


The Perfect Servant

by Evilchuckles



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Class Difference, Drama, Historical Bigotries, M/M, Potentially triggering references to attempted sexual assault of a minor, Potentially triggering references to canon compliant consensual relationship between siblings, References to Suicide, Romance, Smut, Triggering for childbirth trauma, Triggering for claustrophobia, Victorian British Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 20:47:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 48,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16126433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilchuckles/pseuds/Evilchuckles
Summary: Lord Seymour (Sanzo) gets along well with his butler, Caleb (Hakkai).Society might say he gets along too well with him.





	1. Chapter 1

“I’m off and you can take your reference and stick it up his lordship’s arse!”

Caleb sighed. 

His lordship’s latest valet was throwing his possessions into the suitcase he had only unpacked three weeks ago, steaming with rage, and apparently determined to put as much distance between himself and his erstwhile employer as possible, even if it meant walking to the train station, which was fifteen miles away. 

Caleb had to confess to having some sympathy for the man. 

And some respect too, because three weeks was at least a week longer than any of the others had managed. 

“I don’t suppose that I can persuade you to stay on, at least until we can advertise for a replacement?” Caleb said, not very hopefully. 

The valet snorted as if Caleb had suggested that he swim the English Channel in a ballgown. “Mr Hodgson, you ought to be grateful that I am leaving without losing my temper with him! Twenty years as a valet, from a family that’s been in service since Queen Anne, but for the first time I almost told a lordship exactly what I think of him.”

“Well, thank you for restraining yourself,” Caleb nodded. “I am appreciative.”

The valet, having finished packing, attempted a rueful smile. “You poor bugger. Pardon my language, Mr Hodgson, but I don’t envy you having to do for his lordship until the next valet comes. What’s more I don’t reckon the next one will even stick it for as long as I did!”

“There is no denying that his Lordship is occasionally a…unique challenge to his domestic staff.”

“And anyone else who’s met him, I’d warrant!” 

 

In the end Caleb arranged for the departing valet to have an excellent reference. Even if he had to write it himself and then trick his employer into signing it. 

It wouldn’t be the first time. 

When it came to managing Lord Seymour of Kellwick, it was sometimes wise to be original in one’s approach. Perhaps even a little devious. Caleb just wished he could find a valet for his master who could do the same. Ever since his Lordship had been old enough for his own man they’d had something of a trial finding valets who would stay longer than a week. Caleb had had such high hopes for this last one but Lord Seymour had eviscerated him as he had all the others. The last straw had been when the hapless servant had found himself face to face with a rifle due to his lordship’s irritation at being kept waiting for his cigarettes. 

Caleb hoped sincerely that the next valet would be made of sterner stuff. Caleb himself didn’t balk at his master’s intermittently threatening behaviour, partly because he didn’t truly believe that his Lordship would ever actually pull the trigger. 

But mostly because Caleb wasn’t particularly concerned about whether he lived or died. 

Although, he did hope that, should he ever die, it would be secure in the knowledge that the household silver was in order.

 

When the dressing bell went before dinner Caleb presented himself at his Lordship’s door. An elegant blonde eyebrow rose.

“Where’s Simpson?” Lord Seymour enquired as Caleb carefully and precisely began the job of dressing him for dinner. Brushes, combs, buttonholes and starched linen, the endless and oddly comforting series of tasks to render one’s employer respectably attired for a meal in his own dining room where no one would even see him, except other servants. Generally Lord Seymour dined alone, as he lived alone, and he did not encourage guests. Still, dressing for dinner was the sign of a gentleman and it didn’t matter if no one saw it.

“I’m afraid that we have once again mislaid a valet, my Lord,” Caleb murmured, picking up a silver cigarette case and slipping it gently into the appropriate pocket. 

“Ha.” A grim smile hovered over sardonic lips. “You mean I’ve frightened off yet another one.”

“He lacked the necessary moral fibre to maintain his position in your household, sir.”

“Nicely put,” Lord Seymour turned his unusual eyes upon him. Caleb was confident that his shiver was invisible. “However, sooner or later we may have to accept that I simply can’t keep a valet.”

“Should that dark day dawn, my lord, when I can no longer find anyone willing to take the position, I hope you will accept my own services.” Caleb stepped back and admired his handiwork. God had done most of it, had made Lord Seymour devastatingly handsome in a way that was almost unearthly, but Caleb was proud that he had also had a hand in making his Lordship exquisitely dressed as well. 

“You can’t take on a valet’s duties as well as your own, Hodgson. It would be insupportable and I would rather have your rare talents as butler.”

Caleb smiled. “Thank you, my Lord. I’m glad that you’re satisfied with my work.”

There was some time yet before dinner would be served so Caleb started to tidy up the room and his Lordship sat down by the fire, long legs stretched out indolently in a way that had its own grace. Caleb privately felt that most things his employer did were graceful. 

Almost painfully so. 

“Of course your work is satisfactory. The house is run like clockwork, none of those domestic disasters my father used to have to put up with. You remember old Tilworthy.”

Caleb did indeed. He had been footman under Tilworthy, the previous butler, and there had been a special sort of agony for Caleb to have to watch the slack way the house had been run back then.  
But many things had been different then, ten years ago. He’d been twenty, only a few years out of the boy’s home, still learning what it meant to be in service, the long hours, the poor remuneration, the negation of one’s own self in favour of the comfort of one’s employer. 

And, of course, his sister had been alive. 

He cut that thought off expertly and with vicious strength, his fingers merely tightening for a moment on the comb he was holding before relaxing again. 

Control. It had been a long battle for it. But he had won. He had achieved indifference and self restraint, almost total circumspection so that now he felt almost nothing on a day to day basis. It was a relief, an escape from the howling pain of grief. It was the only way he could continue without her. 

Except…except there was one thing that still made him feel, and it was represented by the disturbing burn in his belly when he gathered up his employer’s worn shirt for laundering and smelt clean perspiration on the cotton in his arms. Something in his gut lurched and he had to school his expression carefully to hide it.

“Of course,” Lord Seymour observed, staring into the fire and speaking half as if to himself. “They said I was mad to have a thirty year old butler. They said you weren’t ready. Shows what they know.”

Caleb watched as Lord Seymour smoked. Watched his lower lip grasp the cigarette. Watched his mouth. 

The familiar curl of heat in his groin shamed and excited him and he tried not to think about it overmuch. It wasn’t that he was surprised at his own perversion (how could he be when he already knew just what he was capable of when it came to deviance?) but more that it seemed so terribly disloyal and unprofessional to feel such unnatural lust for his master. He didn’t like to even imagine the response if his lordship ever found out about some of the dark desires that lurked inside his respectable servant. 

Especially considering that rumour amongst the staff. The rumour Caleb had heard the bootboy discussing with the charwoman once. Years ago, it was whispered, before Caleb or his sister had joined the staff, when Lord Seymour had been a boy at Eton, there had been an almost-scandal. Something to do with another boy trying to forcibly press his…affections on a thirteen year old Lord Seymour (such things were rumoured to occur regularly at the better schools) and Lord Seymour beating the boy half unconscious for it. The boy had been expelled for deviancy. Lord Seymour had been expelled for nearly killing a fellow student. But it had, apparently, been hushed up and Lord Seymour had finished his schooling elsewhere without further incident. 

So even if Caleb had run mad and attempted to seduce his employer he could only assume that the response would be equally bloody.

Which was just as well, Caleb had long ago decided. 

Because he was past such disturbances as romantic dalliance. All that was over for him. He had loved once and it had destroyed him, and it had destroyed her. And it was his fault she was dead. His fault she had thrown herself into the river and been found bloated and wretched days later. 

He swallowed. Control. He had control these days, didn’t he? He shouldn’t be thinking of such things. 

“Can I do anything else for you, my Lord?” He asked. 

Lord Seymour looked at him strangely. “Hodgson, you are a mysterious sort of chap.”

“My lord?” Caleb blinked.

“Did you know that sometimes you go frightfully still and blank and then you get a deep look as though all the hordes of hell are at your back?” Lord Seymour stubbed out his cigarette and stood. In the distance the dinner gong had peeled out. “I sometimes wonder whether you’re going to suddenly hand in your notice and start out as an evangelical or something of that sort.”

Caleb laughed, grimly. “I promise you, my Lord, that I’ve no plans to turn Methodist or anything like that.”

“Humph. If you say so.”

After his master had gone down to dinner Caleb finished tidying the room and thought, not for the first time, how eerily observant Lord Seymour could be, despite his laconic, careless, manner. 

All the hordes of hell indeed…


	2. Chapter 2

Caleb was on his way to see if his master wanted anything before retiring for the night.

He was _tired_ , tired in his bones in a way he’d not experienced before he entered service but which, fortunately, he experienced less as he moved up in the household to the much coveted position of butler. Having the less physically demanding and more respected role of butler was a lifetime’s ambition for most male servants as much for its less exhausting nature as for the perks that came with it. 

However there were still many days when Caleb burnt the candle at both ends, running hither and thither. 

Today had been one such day. First he’d had to rise earlier than usual to prepare his Lordship’s clothes and do all the other duties normally performed by a valet. He’d taken in his Lordship’s tea and morning newspaper as well, even though that ought to be a maid’s duty, because the whole household knew how inadvisable it was to be the one who woke the master, due to the risk of projectiles, and the sort of language which Caleb couldn’t in all conscience allow the female staff to hear. He was responsible for their morals, after all, and his Lordship did have a tendency to be very…emphatic…when he wasn’t really awake yet. Fortunately nothing worse occurred to Caleb than a regal glare from under the blankets.

After breakfast his Lordship had gone riding and to inspect various improvements in progress on the estate, while Caleb tided his Lordship’s rooms and proceeded with his normal duties. He discussed the day’s menus with Cook. He unlocked and took out the silver and plate required. Then he cleaned and secured his Lordship’s guns because there had been mention of shooting the next morning. His Lordship was erratic in his lifestyle (something Caleb could admit to finding disconcerting sometimes) and might forget all about shooting after all, but that didn’t mean Caleb didn’t have to see that the guns were ready just in case. He would be mortified to fail on so basic a point. 

He liked things to be perfect. 

The silver in the pantry. 

The behaviour of the other servants.

Everything in order, and clean, and spick and span. 

It made him feel _safe_. For awhile.

He had waited at table during his Lordship’s lunch, conducted in comforting silence as usual, and then he was free to update the account books, check and settle tradesman’s bills, and preside over the early servant’s dinner before his Lordship himself dined later. 

He’d had to admonish one of the kitchen maids as they ate because she had decided to mock young Gael, for whom Caleb had a soft spot. How could he not, considering what the poor lad had been through? 

Gael had asked Caleb for a book to read. “I was wonderin’ Mr Hodgson if I could borrow one of them books you got in your parlour? I promise I won’t read it with dirty hands or nothing.”

Caleb was touched at Gael’s sudden and to be honest, uncharacteristic, interest in learning, and opened his mouth to reply but thoughtless Milly had got there first. 

“You?” She laughed, grinning at Gael’s blushing face. “You don’t even read!”

Gael swallowed and looked down at his plate. “I can read a bit. I can read my name. I thought if I had a book to practice with I might read more.”

An echo of long ago laughter rolled around the back of Caleb’s skull. Fifteen years out of the orphanage and he still heard the laughter. _Ha! Caleb the bastard wants to be a gentleman! He’s ever so high and mighty! He wants to go to Cambridge!_ They’d soon beaten that hope out of him. They’d shown him his place. 

But no one said that their ‘place’ couldn’t have at least some learning in it. Why shouldn’t Gael have his book? 

Ignoring Milly Caleb said, “Come to the pantry after his Lordship’s dinner is over and we can discuss it, Gael.”

Gael had nodded at his dinner, mumbled, ‘thank you Mr Hodgson,’ and not said another word thereafter. He had scuttled off after pudding to black the boots, still looking mortified. 

And Caleb had had a quiet word with Milly about mockery and respect and aspiration and why Gael should be treated gently, considering the horror of his past. Milly had been been a member of the household when Gael had joined them, and she knew all about it, she must surely remember the days when Gael had been unable to even speak. Caleb suggested to her that she not tease the boy again. 

He’d been pleasant but quite _firm_. 

She would probably stop crying soon.

His Lordship dined alone as usual. He briefly commented on the progress of the pregnant mare (twins, according to the grooms) but otherwise was silent. He read a book during dinner.   
Caleb had watched him, in the servants way of not seeming to watch, of being invisible. He was quite sure that his Lordship frequently forgot that Caleb was even in the room, which was as it should be.   
An obtrusive servant was a bad servant. 

Although it hadn’t always been this way. 

But, Caleb, reminded himself, that had been a different time. His Lordship had been in need of kindness and support and had turned to Caleb (there had been no one else) in his desperation. 

Caleb sometimes woke in the night to the memory of a thin shoulder under his hand. Shaking. 

After his Lordship had retired to the library Caleb had kept his promise to Gael. 

“Gael, please don’t be embarrassed but may I ask if it’s true that you cannot read?” Caleb asked as gently as possible as they sat in his parlour in front of the fire. 

Gael reddened and twisted his cap in his boot blackened fingers. “Well, I can read the Lord’s Prayer and my name. The dame school didn’t teach much more than that and I weren’t there long anyway.”

Caleb nodded. They hadn’t taught him much more than that, either. Everything else he’d had to teach himself. 

When he told Gael this the boy’s eyes went as round as pennies. “But you’re a gentleman!”

Caleb laughed. “Not truly, Gael. I will never be a gentleman. A butler is still a servant, you know, and I didn’t have much more schooling than you.”

Gael blinked, clearly astonished. “I thought maybe you went to butler school and that’s how you rose so high.”

“Certainly not! There’s no such place as butler school. Anyone can rise to butler, if they work hard enough. I started in this house blacking the shoes, just like you.”

“Blimey!” Gael said. “So you learned all them books and long words by yourself?”

“Yes, I did. And so can you, except that I’ll help you.”

Gael’s smile lit up the room. 

So now, as he helped his Lordship undress for bed, Caleb mentioned it. “My lord, I’m going to teach young Gael his letters.”

His lordship snorted. “That’s a big task, Hodgson. He’s never struck me as the bookish type.”

Caleb smiled as he took the worn shirt and added it to the pile of laundry to be taken downstairs. It smelled of smoke and newsprint. Always that combination of scents made Caleb’s heart beat a little faster than it should.

“He’s ashamed of his ignorance and he wants to better himself. As I did,” Caleb said.

“If you want to spend your free time tutoring the boy then I won’t stop you, but you’re in for a disappointment if you think he’ll be as clever as you,” his Lordship remarked, turning away to pick up his nightshirt, pulling it over his head to cover the lean, pale, skin that Caleb tried so hard not to covet. 

Tried so hard and failed so utterly. 

“I wanted to be more than I was,” Caleb said, his arms full of laundry. “I don’t know that cleverness is as important as the thirst for knowledge.”

His lordship sat on the edge of his bed and lit a cigarette, looking at Caleb wryly through the smoke. In the darkening bedroom lit only by a gas lamp and the banked fire, Caleb’s master seemed to glow. 

“You’ve more thirst for knowledge than most of the chaps I was at Cambridge with. You’d probably have knocked them all right off their perches, had you gone.” His Lordship’s beautiful eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You should have gone, I think.”

“Thank you, my Lord, but even if such a thing had been possible, I know my place.” 

Or, more truthfully, others had made sure that he would know it. 

His Lordship could never understand such things and it would be wrong for Caleb to bother him with explanations of it. He rather wished though that his Lordship hadn’t said that, about Caleb going to Cambridge, because it _hurt_ to think of the dreams he’d had. Now dead.

Like so many things.

“Do you need anything else, sir?” Caleb asked, thinking that his feet ached and he’d like to finish his duties, lock up the house, and go to bed. 

“No, off you go.”

As Caleb turned to leave a sock fell off his pile of laundry and landed by the bed. Before he could bend to retrieve it his Lordship reached for it and handed it back. “Here you are,” he said. “I know you get upset if you can’t pair the socks.”

Caleb blushed and took it.

As he did their fingers brushed, touched, and stilled against each other. Caleb was intensely aware of his master’s smooth warm hand, aware of it all through his body, aware in a way that was an inch from desire and a breath from panic. 

For a moment they just looked at each other, his Lordship with a slight frown between his brows, and Caleb’s hair prickling at the base of his skull. 

Then their fingers parted, although Caleb never knew who broke the connection first, and he heard himself bid his Lordship goodnight, and then he was walking out of the room like an automaton.   
In the corridor he leaned against the door.

To catch his breath.


	3. Chapter 3

Caleb was able to hide his true nature almost perfectly. He was the reserved, dignified, head of an efficiently run staff by day, a man of precise habits and irreproachable character. Never a hair out of place or an emotion visible. A servant to be relied upon and entrusted with the well being of one of England’s great stately homes, despite his comparatively young age. 

It was only at night that his performance, his imitation of humanity, faltered. 

Because he couldn’t control his dreams. They were things of howling almost gleeful despair, full of dark violence, haunted by the face he had adored.  
In his dreams his grief and unhappiness seemed to writhe under his skin, like vines from some unnatural growth determined to escape and suffocate the world, boiling and seething and trying to burst through his flesh. 

The strange thing was that…in his dream, he _wanted them to_.

 

One morning he was sitting in his parlour, grimly staring at the calendar, when Gael burst in with the post. Caleb gently admonished the boy (who, it seemed, would never learn to be as silent as a servant should) and picked up the afternoon edition of The Times to be ironed. He took great pleasure in giving his Lordship a flawlessly smooth newspaper. He was quite convinced that it added to his Lordship’s enjoyment in reading it. 

Before he did however he noticed that Gael was hopping from foot to foot, clearly barely repressing an urge to speak.

“Yes, Gael?” He enquired.

The boy’s golden eyes were clouded with worry. “He didn’t eat no breakfast, Mr Hodgson.”

“He didn’t eat ’any’ breakfast,” Caleb corrected, firmly. “And, no. He did not. In fact he didn’t even take the tray into his room, though I left it there outside.” He’d had to leave it outside because his Lordship had not only not come down to breakfast but he wouldn’t allow anyone into his room either. Any knocking merely resulted in a curt, ‘go away.’

“Is it…is it the day?” Gael asked, nervously rubbing his hair so that it stood up in spikes, tipped with boot black like a brush. “I remember he was like this on the same day last year and all the years I’ve been ‘ere.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a servant’s place to ask such questions, Gael.”

Gael snorted. “Mr Hodgson, it’s _him_. I ain’t going to let him be unhappy if there’s owt I can do about it.”

Caleb was touched. “Very well, since your heart is in the right place, I’ll tell you. Four years ago, before you came here, the elder Lord of Kellwick died on this day. His Lordship always grieves for him especially deeply at this time. I’m afraid there is nothing you can do to help him.”

Gael frowned. “Enough to stop eating? I don’t reckon there’s anything would stop me eating.”

Caleb hid a smile, not wanting to offend Gael who was looking so earnest and worried. “It was a terrible time for his Lordship, for all of us. The elder Lord was much loved by everyone, and the manner of his death was very…”

 _Blood, blood on the sheets, the pillows, even on the wall when the coughing was especially violent, and nothing, nothing, nothing to be done. Only watch it, listen to it, pray for it to end._ Caleb shuddered. He couldn’t tell Gael about that. The boy had his own horrors to forget, he didn’t need more. 

“It was very painful and terrible,” he said, finally. “His Lordship was just home from Cambridge and still very young. It’s my belief that he has never got over losing his guardian in that way.”

Gael nodded grimly. “Is that why his Lordship is cross all the time?”

“Er…to some extent,” Caleb said. 

But personality had a lot to do with that too…

“Mr Hodgson, could you explain something else to me?” Gael bit at his lip. “Can you tell me what the maids mean when they say that his Lordship was born on the wrong side of the sheets? I mean, how can someone be born on the wrong side of the sheets? I reckon a woman can have her baby on whatever side of the sheets she damn well likes! It looks horrible enough and,”

“Gael!” Caleb had stop him there. Such dreadful and indelicate language! And when had Gael seen a woman give birth? 

Sometimes Caleb forgot how little they actually knew of the boy’s life before he had come here.

“Sorry, Mr Hodgson,” Gael’s cheeks reddened. “I shouldn’t have said ‘damn.’” He groaned. “And I’m sorry I said it again!”

Caleb sighed. There was no denying it, Gael would never be above stairs material. No footman duties for him! He simply couldn’t be allowed to talk to his betters because of the danger of what might come out of his mouth. 

In truth though Caleb rather liked Gael’s directness. His honesty. 

“Nor is it considered nice to refer to a lady in such a condition,” he pointed out. “I’m also quite dismayed to hear that the maids discuss such things.”

“But what does it mean?” Gael insisted. 

Caleb had a feeling that Gael would never let this lie, not something that touched on his beloved master. Anything to do with his Lordship’s health and wellbeing was, it seemed, Gael’s personal province. He worshipped the man, in short, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for him. Caleb was going to have to tell him.

“You must promise me not to discuss this with anyone else. It’s common knowledge amongst the older servants but that does not excuse gossiping.” Caleb gestured to the boy to sit down in the chair opposite the desk. Caleb put the newspaper back down on the table and smoothed it gently with his fingertips. “I came here ten years ago as footman and Mr Tilworthy, the former butler, told me the story. His Lordship was not born in this house. In fact, it is not known _where_ he was born. Lord Christopher simply came home one day with a baby. He would answer no questions about it, merely smiling, and insisting that he had adopted the boy, that his name was Seymour, and that he would be Lord Christopher’s heir.”

“Blimey!” Gael’s eyes were like saucers. 

“You can imagine the rumours that went about the neighbourhood. Most people assumed, still assume, that Lord Seymour is illegitimate, which is to say that he was born to Lord Christopher and a lady to whom Lord Christopher was not married. To put it another way, on the wrong side of the sheets.” 

“Oh… _that_ ,” Gael said, the light visibly dawning. “Is that all? Lord Seymour’s ma wasn’t married to Lord Seymour’s pa? Neither was mine! That’s the way of things, ain’t it?”

Caleb hesitated, aware of being on very delicate ground here. “It’s certainly the way of things in many poorer areas, such as where you and I came from, but it most emphatically does _not_ happen in Lord Seymour’s class. It was a great scandal, especially when Lord Christopher left the estate to Seymour, and never produced a birth certificate or any explanation of where the boy had come from. People always think the very worst if they’ve nothing to prove otherwise and there were local families that wouldn’t associate with Lord Christopher after that.”

And children who hadn’t been permitted to play with Seymour.

And at least one school which had refused to take the boy. 

And always, Caleb knew, the whispers and the sneering and the word ‘bastard’ in the back of people’s minds. 

When Caleb had arrived in the house Seymour had been fifteen, withdrawn, angry, and very silent. He only seemed to relax with his father. And then his father had been taken from him, aged but forty-five, coughing his life away over months. 

When people condemned Lord Seymour as unfriendly, arrogant, obnoxious, Caleb remembered these things and thought, ‘So would you be.’

“Right then,” Gael nodded. “I understand now, Mr Hodgson. And I won’t let you down, I promise. I won’t talk about it.”

“Off you go then, back to your work.”

“Yes Mr Hodgson.”

As Caleb watched Gael dash out (the boy never walked when he could run, never spoke when he could laugh) he thought that there were hardly three people in the world more different than he, Gael, and Lord Seymour, but that they all had one thing in common. 

They were all bastards. 

 

Evening had fallen and Caleb had decided to act. His Lordship hadn’t come down to dinner. He hadn’t been seen outside of his room all day, in fact, and Caleb couldn’t sleep until he had seen his Lordship and encouraged him to eat something. Seymour was quite thin enough without missing meals.

So, with a nervous swallow, he knocked and ignored the order to go away. He opened the door, cautiously. A book flew through the air but he’d been expecting a projectile of some sort and ducked. He closed the door behind him and let his eyes adjust to the dark room. He smelt cigarettes and brandy. 

“What do you want, Hodgson?” Seymour snapped. He was hunched up in the window seat looking out upon the park surrounding the great house. He looked thin and very young. 

Caleb picked his way carefully around cigarette packets and discarded books until he was stood behind his master, looking out at the night. Seymour’s eyes met his briefly in the window pane and then slid away. Caleb remembered a time in the awful days after Lord Christopher’s death when Seymour had been wordless, broken, and Caleb had lost his head and reached out one night and taken the young man in his arms. 

It had been a deplorable thing to do, worthy of instant dismissal, but Seymour hadn’t stopped him, had only curled up in the embrace, thin and cold, and talked about blood, until exhausted he had finally slept, for the first time in days. Caleb had stayed all night, holding him tight, overwhelmed with pity.

They had never spoken of it since.

“Your Lordship should eat something,” Caleb said. 

Seymour glared at him. Caleb barely flinched. He’d had plenty of practice. “I don’t want to eat. I indicated that by telling you to go away. So, go away.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

The words were out before Caleb had known he was going to say them and his heart nearly stopped in horror. Seymour blinked at him in the window, a dull sort of amazement in his eyes. “What’s got into you all of a sudden?”

“My Lord, forgive me, I…” Caleb’s heart was pounding and his cheeks felt hot. He’d directly contradicted his better! He’d never slipped up like this! Not since Lord Christopher’s death. The only explanation that he could think of was that if there was one thing in this world that he felt entitled to express an opinion on it was grief. “I forgot myself, I’m sorry.”

Seymour turned in the window seat and looked at him, a long and assessing look. Then he took a deep breath which turned into an exasperated sigh and reached for the cigarettes next to him. When he lit one it made him look like an icon in church, glowing in the reflection of votive candles, all else dark.

“Tell me,” Seymour said, picking a stray bit of tobacco from his tongue. Caleb found himself watching Seymour’s lower lip move, found himself wanting to bite it. Gently. “Do you think you’re my father? Do you think you are responsible for me, now Christopher is dead?”

“Not at all!” Caleb was horrified, not to mention appalled, because his feelings for Seymour were decidedly more base than paternal. “That’s not why I,”

“I don’t need a father, Hodgson. If I choose not to eat, that’s my own damn business. Am I Lord here, or am I not?”

“Of course you are Lord.” Caleb realised he was wringing his hands and forced himself to stop. To breathe. “I spoke out of turn but only because I am concerned for your health and I…I…”

Seymour stared at him. 

“I…know what it is to feel grief that consumes all, breaks all, takes everything from you.” Caleb ground to a halt, mortified, wondering if he was about to lose his position and thinking that he couldn’t endure to be sent away. 

Lord Seymour slowly stood up, stiffly, as though he hadn’t moved in hours. 

And then a cool, thin, hand came down on Caleb’s shoulder. He looked up, pulse thudding, and in the dimness saw Seymour’s face, saw grim understanding. Saw raw misery masked by resentment. But only for a moment. 

“Yes,” Seymour nodded. “It was only two months after my father that your sister died, was it not?”

Caleb nodded mutely. 

They looked at each other. 

“I suppose,” Seymour said at last, “That we might as well stagger on together then. Without them. You and I.”

“My Lord…”

Seymour’s hand moved away and he turned, heading for the bathroom. “Just don’t contradict me again.”

“No, my Lord.” 

Relief swamped him. 

He was about to leave when Seymour’s voice drifted out, wearily, from the bathroom over the sound of running water. “Bring me up something to eat before you retire, since you insist.”

Caleb had to swallow a glow of happiness. He wanted to go into the bathroom and take Lord Seymour into his arms again. He wanted to tell him that he wasn’t despised or disliked by _everyone_. He wanted to kiss him and give him pleasure, to distract him from the memory of the date on the calendar. 

But he was only a servant, so he just said, “As you wish, my Lord.”


	4. Chapter 4

“He’s done it again, Mr Hodgson!”

Caleb looked up from the accounts and said, reproachfully, “And who is ‘he’, Agnes?” 

The maid blushed. “I’m sorry, Mr Hodgson. _His Lordship_ has done it again.”

Caleb sighed. “Which one is it? The tapestry or the chandelier?”

“The tapestry, sir.”

“I see. Well, thank you Agnes, I will attend on his Lordship forthwith.” 

“Good luck, Mr Hodgson!” 

After she had gone, in a flurry of white apron and the smell of Pear’s soap, Caleb stood, smoothed down his clothes and set grimly about the business of the hour. His Lordship, it seemed, was irate. This happened frequently. In fact, his Lordship was almost always at least a little irate. However there was an important difference between general displeasure and a more serious anger caused by something in particular. The easiest way to determine which type of irate Caleb was dealing with was to ask two questions. 

Had any of the maids started crying.

Had his Lordship shot the tapestry or the chandelier. Again. 

In the latter case of affairs Caleb always took a moment to marvel that somehow his Lordship had succeeded in taking the gun from the gun room without anyone seeing him and therefore without Caleb being told about it (Caleb had learnt from past experience and now had various systems in place so that he would be informed at once if his Lordship was seen lingering about the projectile weapons on days when no hunting was expected). But no matter what Caleb did his employer still somehow succeeded in obtaining a pistol so deftly that the first Caleb usually knew about it was the sound of gunfire, or at least shouting. 

Caleb smiled faintly to himself as he proceeded to the great hall. 

His Lordship really was a very clever man. 

If you excluded his destructive treatment of valuable medieval tapestries. 

When he arrived at the doors of the great hall he paused with his ear to the door and determining that no bullets were in motion right at this precise moment he thought it safe to proceed. Comparatively safe. 

He cautiously opened the door. The usual and oddly comforting smell of the older parts of the house hit his nostrils, the scent of old wood and history, of stone and ancient textile. His Lordship was leaning against the long table and glaring at nothing especially, until Caleb hoved into view whereupon he glared at Caleb. 

It occurred to Caleb to be heartened that only a few days after the anniversary of the death of Lord Christopher his Lordship was so cross and energetic. He glanced at the tapestry which now sported a noticeable hole in the usual place. 

“Damn it Hodgson, can’t you write to my aunt and tell her I’m dead or mad or that she’s a frightful old biddy?”

Ah, Caleb smiled, yes, his Lordship was once more quite his usual genial self.

“I take it from your perturbation that Lady Smythe has been in communication, my Lord?” He said. He spied the pistol on the table next to his Lordship and edged towards it. _That_ was going right back in the gun case. 

“Yes, and what’s more she’s invited herself for the weekend.”

Caleb stopped edging and blanched. “The entirety of the weekend, my Lord? Oh…dear.”

Seymour nodded, grimly. “Yes, that’s what I said.”

“My understanding, sir, is that you didn’t exactly _say_ anything,” Caleb ventured. He schooled his expression carefully to avoid accusations of cheek. 

Seymour’s eyes drifted to the much abused tapestry and shrugged. “Actions speak louder, Hodgson. Besides,” he sighed and crossed his arms. “It’s hardly a great work of art. I can’t understand why my father kept it up all those years.”

Caleb smiled. “His Lordship once told me that it was important that you have a hobby.”

Seymour blinked at him and then burst out laughing, an oddly merry sound from such an habitually angry man and one that Caleb heard too rarely and so treasured. Especially if Caleb himself had been the cause of the laughter. 

Inside he glowed a little. 

“Well,” Seymour said finally. “It’s my father’s fault too that we’re going to have to endure three days with Aunt Eliza. If I write and tell her to go hang I rather think my father’s shade will descend to give me what for. He couldn’t stand her either but _manners_ and what not.”

“Yes, my Lord. I’ll have a guest bed made up.”

“Oh, it’s worse than that. You’ll have to make up six guest beds.” Seymour stalked over to the tapestry and examined the damage coolly. “She is bringing her dreadful old friend, Miss Lawton, and no less than three young ladies, all of whom are no doubt expected to aim for my affections.”

Caleb couldn’t imagine which affections those would be. Those poor young ladies. They wouldn’t have any more luck than any of the others. Caleb rather fancied that if someone cut his Lordship in half they would find the word ‘bachelor’ written all through him, like a stick of rock from the seaside. 

“That only amounts to five guests, my Lord,” he pointed out, joining Seymour at the tapestry. 

“I’m also going to ask Lawrence.” Seymour poked a pale finger through the gunpowder stained hole. 

“Mr Gideon Lawrence?” Caleb asked, bewildered. Gideon Lawrence was from a local gentry family and had been at school with Seymour. They did not like one another and yet Gideon had stayed with them in the summer holidays a few times. Mr Tillworthy, the previous butler had explained to Caleb once that Lord Christopher had been friends with Gideon’s mother, before her death, and had felt responsible for the lad. 

“His Lordship always insisted that Master Seymour invite Master Gideon for the summer,” My Tillworthy had told him. “Even though they fought like rats in a sack most of the time. There was some sort of scandal in the Lawrence family around the time Master Gideon’s mother died and the new Mrs Lawrence isn’t the maternal sort. I think Lord Christopher felt sorry for the lad.”

Gideon hadn’t been to stay in four years, not since Lord Christopher’s death, although Caleb knew that Lord Seymour kept up a sporadic association with him by letter. 

“Yes, he’s back home after his grand tour and, frankly, I need a chap to balance out the horde of frightful women. Even a chap like Gideon.” Seymour shrugged. 

Caleb thought that his Lordship must be dreading the descent of his aunt and her eligible young women even more than he’d thought if Mr Lawrence was considered necessary to distract him. 

“Perhaps Mr Lawrence could be a type of…human tapestry,” Caleb suggested, unable to help himself. 

Seymour snorted. “Mind your manners, Mr Hodgson. And yes. That’s exactly it.”

“Very well, my Lord. I’ll have the guest bedrooms made up and I’ll warn the maids.”

“About Gideon?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I swear to you, Mr Hodgson, if we have one more red-headed baby in this house as a result of Lawrence, I’ll lynch him.”

“He does also deal very honourably with the young woman, my Lord. I saw Hilary only last week. She’s thriving at the milliners and is being courted by a local farmer.”

And, as usual, the farmer seemed blissfully unaware that Hilary’s charming red haired ‘adopted’ daughter was rather less adopted than was proper for an unmarried lady. 

“If only he dealt honourably with them _before_ , then we wouldn’t have lost so many maids over the years.”

Caleb refrained from pointing out that they had lost more maids as a result of Seymour’s own personality (shouting, shooting, and so on) than as a result of Mr Lawrence’s priapic endeavours. “The girls are always warned about him, my Lord.” he pointed out. “But they always seem happy to…to… They seem unwilling to resist him, Sir.”

“Humph,” Seymour remarked. “Nevertheless, it would probably benefit the local women if Gideon took this tapestry as a template for his behaviour.”

Caleb responded without thinking, “If he had anything like the success with young men that he has with young women no one would be safe.”

Caleb blushed. He’d stepped over the line with that comment, and he knew it. What his lordship had merely implied, Caleb had stated, and one didn’t talk about such things.

They stood looking at the tapestry in silence for awhile and Caleb was relieved not to be chastised for his crude comment. 

“I hate this thing,” Seymour said, quietly. 

Caleb jumped. “It…it certainly isn’t the most cheerful of the biblical scenes.”

“My father hated it too. I think that’s one of the reasons I was never seriously punished for shooting at it.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

The tapestry was very old but it was clearly the story of Sodom. On the left of the picture two young men were smiling at each other while a devil perched in a nearby tree smirking and dropping apples. Around them were various scenes of other men drinking and dancing with animals, mostly apparently goats but they could be sheep. In the centre of the picture was God’s avenging angel, lecturing cowering figures. On the right was the city destroyed, and the same two young men now no longer smiling, but lying prone and apparently dead amongst the wreckage of the buildings. 

What interested Caleb was that whenever Seymour shot the tapestry it was always the avenging angel that he shot.


	5. Chapter 5

Caleb felt sick. 

He had failed in the most important of a butler’s duties, to safeguard the household’s valuables, and now he must confess all to Lord Seymour and hope that he would still have his position by the end of it. 

He had looked again and again, in mounting horror, but there was no escaping the fact that the eighteenth century solid silver tea service was gone from the supposedly locked cabinet in the dining room.   
Every monogrammed, shining, spoon, cream jug, tea strainer, cake knife and all the accompanying porcelain. He simply couldn’t understand it. He’d checked and cleaned each item only six months before and carefully locked it away again (there wasn’t much call for its actual use with no lady in the house). But when he’d come to take it out, preparatory to Lady Smythe’s arrival for the weekend, it was gone. 

His stomach had fallen into his feet and wild imaginings chased one another through his mind as he went, leaden-footed, to his master’s study to confess. Maybe there had been burglars? Or, and this idea made him desperately distressed, maybe one of his own staff had stolen it? He trusted every footman, groom, stable hand, and maid in his employ and the thought that one of them could have betrayed the family so utterly…What would Lord Christopher have said?

He paused miserably outside the study. 

_What was Lord Seymour going to say_?

He knocked and entered on a curt invitation to find the golden head bent over some estate books. Seymour looked up, frowning, and Celeb swallowed.

“Mr Lord…I am so very sorry but…” Caleb then realised to his horror that he couldn’t go on. 

He liked to think that his Lordship respected him. His Lordship certainly treated him more as an equal than most servants could expect from their master, asking Caleb’s opinion on matters to do with the estate, talking to him occasionally of deeper things, giving Caleb books and saying, ‘I think you would enjoy this.’ Seymour trusted him to do his job and do it well, and that was surely the foundation of his respect. 

Caleb was about to lose it. 

“Well?” Seymour asked, frown deepening. “You’re as white as a sheet. It’s not Gael, is it? I thought he had stopped all that.”

“He has, my Lord. He hasn’t had one of his turns in months. No, it’s…I went to take out the silver tea service so that the ladies can have tea while they’re here and…it’s gone.”

“Oh, that. Yes, I know.”

Caleb gaped. Seymour shrugged and leaned back in his chair, shutting the book he had been examining with a loud snap. “You know?”

“Yes,” Seymour nodded significantly at the open door behind him and so Caleb closed it, cutting them off from the rest of the house. “The truth is Mr Hodgson, that I took the service and I had it auctioned off.”

Caleb felt it like an almost physical blow. That service was one of the estate’s proudest possessions, handed down for generations. It was _part_ of the house, used, displayed, cleaned and stored lovingly and with an eye to future generations, for two hundred years. Caleb couldn’t quite grasp that it could be disposed of so easily and in such a cavalier fashion. 

If he hadn’t been talking to his better, whom he was not entitled to judge, Caleb thought he would have described his current feeling as anger. 

“I had planned to discuss the situation with you, Hodgson, sooner or later but I suppose now you’ve found out we’d better go through it.” Seymour reached out for one of the estate ledgers and beckoned Caleb over to his desk. 

Caleb stood beside him and looked at the figures Seymour showed him. 

And the bills.

And the letters from the bank.

Seymour sighed and drummed his long, elegant, fingers on the blotter. Caleb was very close to him, standing like this, and he had a wild desire to kiss the top of his head. 

And then his mouth. 

He blinked, pushing the thought away. “Mr Lord, is this why you’ve been holding off on the repairs to the dower house? And the work that needs doing in the park?”

“Yes. Because I can’t pay for it.”

There was a long silence. Caleb chewed at his lower lip. He had known that the estate wasn’t what it had been in Lord Christopher’s father’s day. Mr Tillworthy had used to complain that things had been done much more lavishly thirty years ago. And there were fewer servants than there had been even when Caleb had joined the household. Caleb knew, they all knew, that money was a little tight.

But he’d never dreamed that it was as bad as this. 

“The silver service raised five hundred pounds at auction,” Lord Seymour told him, with a challenging purple gaze. “I used it to pay for the roof.”

“My Lord…” Caleb was heartily ashamed of himself for even briefly thinking that his Lordship would have sold a family heirloom for anything other than a good reason. “How can I assist you?”

Seymour smiled one of his extraordinary smiles, all flash and glow and then gone as if it had never been. Like his laughter, it was something Caleb had never known as much as he’d have liked. “You already are assisting. You run the day-to-day accounts with an iron will and make clever economies without even seeming to. Don’t think I hadn’t noticed. Don’t think I’m not conscious that our domestic expenditure has gone down instead of up these last four years, despite the rising prices. Don’t think I haven’t been fully aware who I have to thank for that.”

Caleb was blushing fiercely at such unaccustomed praise. He made himself move away from the desk and stand on the rug by the door again, because he was rather afraid that if he continued so close to his master he might do something rash. 

“But,” Seymour continued, “The estate itself, the parkland, everything and everyone attached to it and for whom I am responsible…that’s another matter. I disliked algebra at school, Hodgson, as I think you know. But even I can see when the sums don’t add up.”

“What is your plan, my Lord?” Caleb asked, gently. 

“I don’t know. I haven’t planned it yet.”

Caleb hid a smile. “I will put some thought into the matter, my Lord. They do say that two heads are better than one.”

Seymour grunted assent and Caleb, knowing that he had been dismissed, turned to go. 

“While you’re here,” Seymour’s voice came. 

Caleb turned just in time to catch a thrown book. He blinked at it.

“I think you would find that interesting,” Seymour told him, bending his head to the ledgers again. “But for god’s sake don’t be seen with it. It caused a frightful scandal among the society bores. They called it ‘immoral’. Reason enough to read it in my opinion. Besides, it’s rather good.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Caleb said, bemused. His Lordship had lent him books before (access to the library was a butler’s perk, but Seymour went further and recommended things to Caleb sometimes) but never one that required a warning!

He forgot to look at the book at all until evening, being earnestly occupied with the financial situation, trying to think of a way out of it that would accord with dignity of an ancient family. Selling up was the obvious answer but one too awful to be long entertained and he knew that Seymour would never consider it. 

So it wasn’t until he was lying sleepless, worrying, and decided to read to try to relax, that he picked up the book again and read the title.

_The picture of Dorian Grey._

‘I’ll just read the first chapter,’ he thought. ‘No more than that. I’m up early for Lady Smythe’s arrival.’

He finished the book just as the sun was rising, heart pounding, shaking, and a crazed new hope dawning in his chest. 

‘Why did he give me this book?’ he wondered, getting up dazedly to wash and shave. ‘This book about a man with hidden, dark, desires. This book about a man who wants illicit pleasures hinted at but never spelled out as such. A beautiful man who inspires passion, (the author is circumspect but surely it is meant to be physical passion!) in another man. _Why did Seymour give me this book_?’

 

He had to work harder than usual to force down his true feelings when he dressed Seymour that morning. He made himself look but not see all that naked skin as he covered it in white linen, that muscled stomach, those narrow hips. All the beauty of a man who inspires passion. 

Caleb was interested to hear his own voice sounding ordinary as they discussed the impending arrival of their guests, talking about menus and ‘entertainments’ (his Lordship’s voice full of scorn over the latter, ‘they chose to descend upon me en masse, it’s their look out if they have a bore of a time! I hope they do, maybe it will stop Aunt Eliza doing this sort of thing.’) Caleb had a little trouble though fastening his Lordship’s cuffs because his hands were trembling and Seymour rose an eyebrow at him.

“Something on your mind, Hodgson?”

Caleb considered lying and saying that he was distracted with thoughts of their financial problems but instead he opened his mouth and the truth came out. “I read the book, my Lord.”

Seymour went still. His gaze, cool, thoughtful, raked over Caleb’s face. “That was quick. What did you think of it?”

They had talked about books before, exchanged opinions, even debated them, but Caleb wasn’t sure how he could talk about _this_ book. 

He couldn’t say, ‘I believe that the scandal over the book was because Mr Grey can easily be read as a lover of men as well as women. Did you read it that way? Is that why you lent it to me, because you’ve seen how I look at you?’

He couldn’t say, ‘If that _is_ the reason please don’t despise me as you did that boy at school who tried to force himself upon you. I would never insult you like that. You are so far above me.’

He couldn’t say, ‘I am Dorian. I have the face the world sees and another that is hidden and marked with terrible sin. Sin I committed with my sister and yet more sin that I wish I could commit with you.’

“I…” he turned and began to pack away the dressing case. “I thought it very modern and very interesting and quite shocking.”

“Hmm…” Seymour passed behind him on his way to the door. “Did you? I met the author in London last winter.”

“Really, my Lord?” Caleb couldn’t string out the tidying any longer and so turned again to face his master. 

Seymour was looking at him, inscrutable as ever. “Yes.”

“Was he agreeable?”

Seymour shrugged. “He was very witty but he talked far too much for my liking. And there was an air about him of…something…unusual.”

Caleb realised his fists were clenched at his sides and deliberately relaxed them. “It would take an unusual man to write such a book, I think.”

“Hn,” Seymour smiled thinly. 

And with that he was gone, down to breakfast, leaving Caleb sighing with relief. And a hope he didn’t dare name.

Even to himself.

 

The first day of Lady Smythe’s visit went well, which is to say that no one got shot.

Lady Smythe arrived soon after breakfast, her faithful Miss Lawton in tow, and three attractive young ladies, Miss Penelope, Miss Lucy, and Miss Margaret, every one of whom trained her brown or blue eyes on Lord Seymour with the palpable awe that his looks always inspired in women. Lord Seymour, for once on his best behaviour (so only moderately sardonic and offhand) took them all on a tour of the park in the landau. 

While they were gone the servants readied themselves to serve luncheon and Caleb placated Mrs Morris, the housekeeper, who had loathed Lady Smythe since a certain comment about the marmalade at Christmas. She had suggested that the marmalade had been bought _in a shop_. Mrs Morris had taken this dreadful insult very much to heart. 

Lunch went off without a hitch, impeccably prepared and served, and making Caleb extremely proud of his staff. 

Unfortunately in terms of lunchtime conversation his Lordship wasn’t quite keeping his end up, having apparently already exhausted his finite patience with having people in his house trying to talk to him. Caleb listened as Lady Smythe lectured him about how it was time he settled down and married (which comment led to much simpering from Miss Penelope, or was it Miss Margaret? They all seemed the same to Caleb, all curl and giggle and clipped accent). It was rather like watching a thoughtless child poking a circus lion. Caleb was quite concerned that Seymour was going to cease his silent glaring and bite his aunt’s head off. 

Although Caleb wasn’t entirely certain that the ladies would notice if Seymour did. Lady Smythe was too busy lecturing (her favourite hobby) and the young ladies were too busy ogling him, for any of them to notice what to Caleb were the clear signs of Seymour’s irritation. This tended to happen, Caleb reflected. Women were so caught up with admiring Seymour’s handsomeness that they didn’t seem to hear anything he said or see that he was bored or uninterested in them. 

Sometimes Caleb thought how lonely it must be to be so desired and yet so little heeded. 

Fortunately just as the vein began to throb in Seymour’s forehead and Caleb started to worry the cavalry arrived.

A red haired cavalry which went by the name of Gideon Lawrence. 

Even Seymour looked relieved to see him, presumably because his appearance meant that Seymour wouldn’t hang for murdering his aunt. They shook hands, exchanged the minimum of social pleasantries, Seymour introduced him to the ladies, and everything went swimmingly from there. Gideon charmed, chatted, and entertained with faultless ease and genuine good nature. Truth be told Caleb had always liked Mr Lawrence and never quite understood why Seymour found him so infuriating, unless it was that Mr Lawrence was everything Seymour wasn’t. Friendly. Charming. A man who found conversation a pleasure rather than a chore.

Miss-very-possibly-Margaret was batting her eyelashes at Mr Lawrence within ten minutes. The other young ladies followed soon after. Even Lady Smythe patted her grey ringlets and cooed. 

Caleb’s eyes met Seymour’s. Seymour smiled slightly and quietly picked up a book. 

 

Later that afternoon Caleb came back from refreshing the teapot to find Gideon briefly alone in the drawing room with an atlas. 

“Hodgson!” Gideon stood up and shook hands with him, heartily. “I never got a chance to say hello. I haven’t seen you since your elevation to the illustrious state of butler. How goes it?”

“I’m very well, thank you sir.” Caleb smiled. “How did you enjoy your grand tour?”

“I’m about to tell the ladies all about it after they have repaired Miss Margaret’s hair. She laughed rather too hard at something and some of her ringlets fell off.”

Caleb spluttered laughter. “Mr Lawrence!”

Gideon grinned, sitting back down with a cup of tea. “I think Lady Smythe was a little shocked. She muttered something about young ladies not needing false hair and it being immodest. Then she dragged poor Seymour off into the library.”

Caleb’s heart sank. 

Gideon saw his expression and nodded. “A lecture I suspect. She had that sort of look.”

Caleb sighed. 

When the ladies (including a subdued and red-faced Miss Margaret) returned Gideon gave them all a magical hour with the atlas and tales of faraway places, exotic food, interesting people, and adventures that might even be true but all of which suspiciously involved Mr Gideon being unfeasibly dashing and romantic. 

Much as Caleb enjoyed it all he felt rather sad. He wished _he_ could see the world. He had used to talk about it with Kassandra, about Italy, Greece and even the far east. They had talked of seeing China.

And they had both known it was only a dream. 

Only people like Seymour, people like Gideon, could see the world. 

‘The rest of us,’ Caleb thought ruefully, ‘Will only ever see the houses we clean but don’t own, clothes we wash but don’t wear, lives we make easy and luxurious but will never live.’

 

Later that evening as he was on his way to strike the gong indicating it was time to dress for dinner, Caleb heard Seymour’s voice coming from his aunt’s sitting room. The door was ajar and, unconscionably, Caleb paused outside to listen. 

“Miss Penelope is heiress to a large fortune, young man, so you had better try to like her!”

“I have no intention of marrying, aunt.” Seymour sounded as though he spoke through gritted teeth.

“Really?” Lady Smythe’s voice was sharp, sharper than Caleb had ever heard it. “You intend then to let the line end with you? No more Kellwicks? Our family is a thousand years old and you repay your father’s kindness and love by throwing away everything he represented?”

“He never married either.”

“No, and that meant he was forced to adopt. Oh, don’t look so cross! I love you dearly my boy and you’re every bit as much a Kellwick as if you were blood (they say you _are_ blood but we’ll not get into that) but you remember the scandal and how you were treated. Wouldn’t you rather marry and have an heir no one will question? And what about the money?”

“What about it?” Seymour replied, flatly.

“Don’t be childish. Your father told me that the financial situation wasn’t exactly rosy and that was twenty years ago. It must be worse by now. Marry a nice girl, a rich girl, and everything will be set to rights.”

Caleb was blinded by his sudden anger so that he hardly saw what he was doing and came back to himself already standing in Seymour’s dressing room, holding out a shirt. Seymour was staring at him.

“I don’t think you’ve heard a word I said since I came in,” Seymour remarked. 

He had lost time. That hadn’t happened in years. Not since those first desperate days after Kassandra killed herself. He felt maddened. His heart was thudding and his skin was crawling with jealousy and panic. “I thought of a way you can resolve the financial problem.” He didn’t mean to sound angry. It just came out that way.

Seymour looked surprised. “What’s wrong with you this evening?”

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Caleb thought desperately, mind racing. ‘I didn’t sleep last night and _why did you give me that book?_ and I’m suddenly afraid, so afraid that you will marry and touch someone else, love someone else, and that’s wrong and dirty and impossible because you’re _mine, mine, mine_.’

“You could marry a wealthy young lady.” There. He had said it. 

“Yes, I could,” Seymour snapped. “But it’s not your place to tell me that.”

“Not my place, no. You’re quite right, my Lord,” Caleb spat.

“Damn it, Hodgson, what is this? Are you ill?”

“Not physically.”

They stared at each other, glaring, breathing hard.

And then Caleb had pulled his master forward and was kissing his mouth with hunger and madness and wild excitement pouring through him. He’d made a mistake. A terrible mistake. Forcing down all his feelings, his desires, since Kassandra died, had only intensified them and now, sparked by jealously, they were bursting out like vines from under his skin. 

‘That false smile of yours will be the death of you one day,’ Kassandra had said once. ‘You can’t be perfect _all the time_ , darling. Eventually you’ll just go off bang!’

He expected his master to strike him but he didn’t. Seymour’s mouth was warm, tasting of smoke and aggravation, and it was kissing back. 

Passion, _lust_ , boiled in Caleb’s belly. It had been so long, so long since he’d known this pleasure, and he had wanted it every time he had looked at Seymour, every single time. 

He had simply run out of ways to tell himself no.

And Seymour wasn’t telling him no either. Seymour was groaning and accepting his servant’s tongue in his mouth, and letting Caleb clutch them together, hip to hip. Caleb laughed in the back of his throat already wondering what an ex-butler with no reference could do for a living, and pushed his master down onto the bed. 

Seymour’s fingers were in Caleb’s hair. 

When Caleb thrust against him his master was hard. 

They had both lost their minds. 

They kissed and kissed and Seymour arched beneath him. 

“You gave me that book,” Caleb whispered into Seymour’s mouth, letting himself believe it at last. ‘So that I would have hope, so that I would understand what you wanted.’ He leaned back, looked at the darkness of Seymour’s aroused eyes, his swollen parted lips, and ran a shaking hand down Seymour’s heaving chest, about to slip it into his trousers, to _touch_. “So I would do this.”

Seymour caught his breath.

And then someone knocked at the door.


	6. Chapter 6

They started away from each other, horrified, panting, and Caleb found himself shoved into the bathroom where he stood, heart hammering against his ribs, and listened to Seymour open the door.

“What?” Seymour snarled.

“You know that’s the thing I’ve always liked about you,” Gideon’s voice, sounding wryly amused. “Your perfect manners.”

“I’m warning you, Lawrence,”

“Fine, fine, I only wanted to borrow a shirt.”

“Take one, take all of them, I don’t care. Just go.”

There was some muttering, the opening and closing of a drawer, and then in the background the dinner gong. All the while Celeb leant with his forehead against the door, almost in tears with frustration, terror, and creeping guilt. He had run mad with jealousy and assaulted his master. The fact that his master had seemed to want it almost made it worse. And that wanting may well be temporary, a lapse that Seymour could not tolerate. With a few moments to think Seymour might come to his senses. Caleb remembered the boy Seymour had beaten half to death at school for the same crime, and then he remembered every penny dreadful story he had read of young men losing their place and being unable to find another and starving on the streets. 

So when the door closed behind Gideon and Caleb emerged from the bathroom it was with a terrible dread, expecting Seymour to at the least be cold and denying, at the worst furious. 

They stood in the dressing room, wordless, for what felt like the longest time. Caleb could hear his heart beating in his ears. It hurt. 

Finally Celeb could endure it no longer. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, stupidly. It was all he could think of to say. 

Seymour took a deep, ragged, breath and then let it out in an irritated sigh. “What for?” he asked. 

And just like that there was a smile on Caleb’s face that he couldn’t hide and Seymour was moving towards him, eyes intent but showing no sign of regret. 

“Did you think it was a secret?” Seymour asked him, wryly, coming to a halt an inch away from him. “I’m not daft. The way you look at me sometimes, as if you can see inside my skin, would have earned you your marching orders from any other employer.” 

Caleb felt himself redden. He wanted to reach out, to kiss Seymour again, now that he knew he could, but he didn’t move and neither did Seymour. Instead Caleb thought they were teetering on the edge of something that felt vast and dangerous, putting off the final step into the unknown. 

“I wouldn’t have had to lend you that damn book if you hadn’t been so obtuse,” Seymour continued, his breath brushing against Caleb’s mouth. “I’ve been waiting for you to understand this last year or more.”

Caleb couldn’t help snorting, openly laughing at his master in a way that felt almost more illicit than kissing him. Years and years of training as a servant was going to take some beating, he realised. 

“Am I to deduce then that you have desired me?” Caleb asked, through a dry mouth.

“Yes, and I was entirely clear about it.” A smile was hovering on the swollen lips, but the eyes burned.

“My Lord, all I can say is that you ‘being clear’ in your desire looks exactly the same as you being sarcastic and annoyed.”

Seymour shrugged and allowed the beginnings of a smile to progress before it abruptly died. He reached out a pale hand and touched Caleb’s face. Caleb started, pulse starting to rattle in his wrists, like a tin can full of nails. 

“This is absolute madness,” Seymour told him, quietly. 

“I know it is.”

The dinner gong went again, in its final warning, and they both groaned before reluctantly pulling themselves away from each other. Caleb wanted to lock the door, lock out the world, and strip his master naked, take him, show him how it was going to be from now on. 

His own hunger shocked him now that he had freed it. How was he to push it down again for the purposes of everyday life? How be the irreproachable servant who knew his place, with thoughts and feelings always masked? 

“After the household has retired tonight,” Seymour said, putting on his dinner jacket and smoothing back his hair. “Come to my room.”

Caleb felt like a maid about to be deflowered by an unscrupulous employer (god knew that it was a common enough story) except that he knew in his heart that _he_ wasn’t the one who would be deflowered. He wondered if Seymour knew that too. It was possible that Caleb would have to explain it to him later. 

All he said now however was, “Yes, my Lord.”

 

As butler it was Caleb’s role to serve at table. 

It had never been this difficult before, not even when he’d been a new footman and not known which spoon went where or how to position the water glasses. 

He did his duties, pouring wine and carving roast beef, in a fever dream of unreality. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep or inside one of the rare fantasies he had allowed himself over the years; fantasies of Seymour’s body and his mouth. Fantasies he had never expected to have come true. 

He stoically avoided eye contact with his employer, considering it safest, and tried to focus on Gideon’s conversation with Lady Smythe and the young ladies, on Miss Lawton’s epic tale of her thwarted girlhood love for a curate who had gone to the West Indies and never come back, on watching young Eric the footman who had only recently started serving at table and was palpably nervous. 

‘Don’t think about what happened,’ he told himself, as he ladled soup. ‘Don’t think about the violence of your jealousy at the very _thought_ that he might marry, the unconscionable possessiveness of someone who is your superior in every way, or what that jealousy led you to do. In particular, don’t think about what could have happened if you hadn’t been lucky enough to be desired in return.’

‘Don’t think about how his mouth tasted,’ he thought, as brought in the wine for the second course. ‘Don’t think about the fact that your kiss made him hard.’

‘Just my kiss…’

“I say, Mr Hodgson, are you quite well?” 

Caleb jumped and found himself being looked at curiously by everyone except Seymour who was examining his plate crossly as if expecting to find secrets in his potatoes. 

“Mr Lawrence,” Caleb forced a smile. “Thank you but I’m quite alright.”

Gideon looked dubious at that, “You look a trifle hectic in the complexion, that’s all.”

Caleb touched his face, felt the heat there. “Oh! Perhaps I caught the sun a little today when I was talking to the groom outside.”

This seemed to satisfy Gideon and dinner proceeded. 

Caleb wondered briefly what on earth he would have said had it not been summer. 

 

After dinner Caleb left the gentlemen to their brandy and cigars (hoping that Seymour wouldn’t be _too_ rude to Mr Lawrence) and settled the ladies in the drawing room where Miss Penelope played charmingly on the piano, Miss Margaret looked mournful and played with her hair, and Miss Lucy listened patiently to Miss Lawton’s health complaints. 

Lady Smythe beckoned Caleb over and said, “Mr Hodgson, I must congratulate you, as ever, on how this house is run.”

“Thank you, my Lady,” he replied, mesmerised by the lamplight glowing off her jewels. 

“My nephew is not an easy employer, I’m sure. I’ve heard about his problems keeping a valet. It’s really not fair that you are having to be valet as well as all your other duties. Would you like me to ask my acquaintances if they know of a valet who might be able to manage him?”

Caleb wasted no time on the suddenly unacceptable thought of allowing a man into the house to dress his master. 

“Thank you, my Lady, but I have someone already in mind for the position.” 

‘Me,’ he thought.

“I hope he will stay longer than the others!” Lady Smythe smiled, ruefully. 

“I am sure he will, my Lady.”

In many smaller households the butler and the valet were often the same person, Caleb told himself. It wouldn’t be so difficult. 

Predictably Seymour and Mr Lawrence didn’t spend long in men’s chat and joined the ladies before Miss Lawton had even got as far as her gout. Lady Smythe suggested cards, which was fortunately one of the few activities Seymour was prepared to do with others, and the rest of the evening passed peaceably. 

It occurred to Caleb in the small part of his mind able to consider anything but Seymour, that the maids of the household were probably going to survive Mr Lawrence’s visit with their virtue intact. Largely because Miss Penelope looked ready to fling her charms at Gideon’s head at the first opportunity. She was looking at him with the air of prospector who has just hit gold, but, to Caleb’s surprise, Gideon was looking faintly worried. 

He found out why an hour later when the cards had ended and he bumped into Mr Lawrence on the veranda. 

“It must have been a long day for you, Mr Hodgson,” Gideon observed, smoking and gazing up at the stars. 

That was another reason that Caleb liked Gideon. It never occurred to most people to think about that sort of thing. To think that their servants were people and might be tired, or sad, or bored. Even as a fifteen year old boy, when Caleb had first met him, Gideon had been this way. As if he didn’t draw the lines between classes that others did.

As if he just saw people.

“I didn’t sleep last night, sir,” he admitted. 

Gideon nodded and went back to smoking for a moment. Caleb was about to return to the drawing room to supervise the cleaning up when Gideon said,

“Mr Hodgson, would you be so kind as to do me a service?”

“Yes, of course, sir!”

Gideon shifted from one foot to another and glanced at him. He looked rather embarrassed. “It’s only that, I was wondering if you would tell an…untruth, on my behalf?”

“What…what sort of untruth?” Caleb didn’t like to be dishonest, despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that much of his life was a lie.

“Well, I’m going to pop to bed now and I was wondering if you could tell the ladies, in particular, Miss Penelope that I’m a trifle too drunk and you’ve left me to sleep it off.”

“If you like, sir,” Caleb was bemused.

“I’d just like to avoid a scene, Mr Hodgson. And there is bound to be one if Miss Penelope…ahem…pays me a visit later.”

Caleb felt himself blushing for the hundredth time that day.

“Dash it, we’re both men of the world, Mr Hodgson. She’s a very pretty girl and all that and normally I would be happy to…but things have changed of late and I think I had better just sleep.”

“Oh! I…see.”

Gideon rubbed the back of his head, making his red hair stand up. “I’ve shocked you, haven’t I, over the years. All that business with Hillary, and so on. You would never dream of behaving so dreadfully yourself.” 

“You’d be surprised, sir,” Caleb blurted. 

Gideon stared at him for a second and then started laughing. 

 

Gideon slipped up to bed without going back into the drawing room and when the ladies enquired where he was Caleb dutifully lied. Miss Penelope looked terribly disappointed and Caleb couldn’t help wondering why Gideon would want to avoid the romantic attentions of such a pretty woman. 

And then, painfully slowly, the evening drew to a close. The young ladies retired at ten, Miss Lawton at ten thirty, but Lady Smythe lingered on, drinking sherry and talking, talking, talking. Seymour looked on the verge of braining her with a fire iron and Caleb thought that after another fifteen minutes he might _help_ him, but finally Lady Smythe announced that she was tired and allowed her nephew to conduct her up the grand staircase. 

Caleb stayed only to turn down the gas lamps, close the French doors, reassure Eric that he had done very well serving at table, and then he ran below stairs and got through the last of his daily duties as fast as he could. 

All the time his hands were shaking.

 

It was after midnight when the house was quiet enough for him to go to Seymour’s rooms unseen. Everything was still apart from the usual creaks and sighings of an old building cooling a little after a hot day, wood and stone contracting. 

Caleb knocked on the door softly and opened it. 

Seymour was sat in the window seat, smoking, but as soon as he saw Caleb he stood up and drew the curtains. 

“You took your time,” Seymour observed, shortly. 

Caleb smiled. “I think we both did, my Lord.”

Seymour ground out his cigarette in the ashtray on the mantelpiece. “You’d better drop that, when it’s just you and I.”

“Drop what?”

“The ‘my lord,’ and ‘sir,’ and all that.” Seymour turned around and looked at him. “I expect you to behave as usual if there are other people to see but when there aren’t my name is Seymour, and you may call me by it.”

“And you must call me Caleb,” he said. Caleb never would have thought he would be so happy to dispose of the butler’s much envied right to be called respectfully by his last name, rather than as all other servants were by their first. 

Seymour smiled, faintly. “Alright.”

Caleb locked the door.

“We are going to have to be very clever and very careful,” Seymour said, walking towards him while pulling his tie away, which tore open his shirt enough to expose his white throat and the pulse jumping in it. 

Caleb shrugged off his jacket and pulled Seymour into his arms, running his thumb over Seymour’s lower lip, letting it slip inside into private wetness. Their moans echoed one another in the silent room. 

“You know what it would mean if we were discovered,” Seymour added, standing against him, his body hot beneath his clothes. 

“Yes, my…yes, Seymour. It would mean disgrace, shame, jail.” Caleb backed away enough to start to unbutton Seymour’s clothes, something he had done many times but never like this. Never with them both breathing too fast and looking each other right in the eye. 

Seymour let Caleb undress him until he stood naked, in the full light of the lamps, and Caleb was shaking so violently that he almost couldn’t speak. His eyes ran over Seymour’s body, over muscle, over skin, over the golden hair between his legs, and then rested on the hard flesh there. 

“My god,” Caleb whispered. “If you don’t want me to have you as…as a man has a woman, then you had better tell me to leave _now_.”

Seymour snorted and lay down on the bed. “You might find I’m not built that way.”

Caleb hesitated, one knee on the bed. Was it possible that Seymour was innocent of such things? “Don’t you know? Don’t you know what men do, because there is a way…”

Seymour tugged him down into his arms and Caleb’s mind left his body for awhile because it was that overwhelming to be pressed against Seymour, their naked skin slick with the summer night and with arousal. Caleb’s body was twitching, eager. 

“I heard mutterings amongst the boys at school,” Seymour told him, his mouth against Caleb’s ear, his hand sliding down Caleb’s spine. “I have a general idea. It never really appealed.”

Caleb’s blood was singing with need, with undeniable hunger. He raised himself up on his arms and looked at his master. Seymour’s face was carefully nonchalant but there was passion there underneath it, and a challenge. He wasn’t going to make it easy for Caleb. Caleb had known his employer long enough to know that. 

“I’m going to have you,” he said, softly. “I’m going to have every inch of you, all that you are. You’ll be glad, I swear.”

Seymour’s eyes darkened and he leaned up to catch Caleb’s mouth. 

“We’ll see then…” Seymour said.

And that was the last thing either of them said. 

 

Caleb didn’t dare kiss him for long, not with Seymour nude beneath him, hard and rubbing and gasping pleasure, because Caleb knew his climax would not hold off if he did. So, within minutes he had dragged himself away from Seymour and reached for the jar of oil that he used on the household’s shoes, to make them supple and shiny. 

He coated his fingers and lay beside his master, kissing his mouth and firmly parting his legs. Seymour’s eyes flashed at him, as if warning that if Seymour didn’t like what was coming it would be stopped in no uncertain terms. Caleb said nothing, only started to stroke and tease, searching out the place and making it soft and wet and then slipping his fingers in, one by one, watching Seymour’s face, watching pain change to pleasure and then to lust. 

Slowly, very slowly, he took Seymour with his fingers, pressing deeper and deeper, until Seymour groaned and arched off the bed, hips jerking in a way Caleb was sure Seymour wasn’t even conscious of, perspiration shining on his chest so that Caleb couldn’t resist bending his head and licking it from a pink nipple. 

Seymour dug his fingers into Caleb’s hair and dragged him roughly up and on to him, looking at Caleb with fierce expectation.

Caleb thought, ‘Yes, yes, you’re mine, I always knew it, deep down.’

He made himself forget everything else, made himself forget that they were master and servant, that they were surely as doomed as he had ever been with Kassandra, made himself forget all that and made himself _hope_.

He entered him in only two firm thrusts and held a hand down over Seymour’s mouth to silence his cry, turning it into a quietly agonised moan of pleasure and shock. And he kept his hand there all the while he had him because in a distant part of his mind he understand that they had to be quiet, even though he felt like howling pleasure to the sky.

He bit his lip, partly also to be quiet but also in the hope that pain would stave off his climax, because lord in _heaven_ Seymour was so tight and hot and the pleasure was so wildly intense as Caleb moved hard and deep inside him, Seymour’s groans vibrating against Caleb’s hand, Seymour’s cock hard and wet between their bellies. 

Skin and sheets and heat and fire, hips moving, driving, meeting each other with gathering urgency, and no way of stopping, no place for sanity, no thought of anything but rutting and pleasure and the sudden wetness between them from Seymour’s climax, and _yes_ …

Caleb finally took his hand from Seymour’s mouth, kissed him bruisingly.

And climaxed inside him, hands tight on Seymour’s hips, shuddering triumph at the thought of it. 

 

Afterwards he meant to speak, to demand promises, ‘tell me we’ll always be like this,’ but he didn’t somehow. 

He only lay with Seymour in his arms for as long as he could. Until dawn began to creep under the curtains and the possibility that he would be looked for and missed grew. With bone-deep unwillingness he stood up, kissed Seymour one last time, and dressed himself with exhausted hands. 

Seymour reached out for a cigarette and lit it, breathing in a long sigh and rubbing at his eyes. He lay on the bed, watching Caleb tidy away all evidence of the night before, including the oil. 

_Almost_ all the evidence. 

Because after he’d touched Seymour’s face, wordlessly, and left the room, all he could think about was how Seymour had looked, lying naked on a bed, with Caleb’s seed staining his thighs.


	7. Chapter 7

Caleb wasn’t surprised when his master failed to join his guests for breakfast. A maid had tapped on Seymour’s door to ask if he would be coming down. 

“What did he say?” Caleb murmured, when she edged into the breakfast room.

Nearby Mr Lawrence was starting his third sausage. 

The maid blushed. “He…used a bad word. He _certainly_ won’t be coming down.”

Caleb suppressed a smile. Really, Seymour shouldn’t swear at the staff, particularly at the female staff, but Caleb had to concede that Seymour might be a mite grumpier than usual today. 

‘Because,’ he thought, in another attempt to convince himself that it had all happened and he wasn’t soft in the head. ‘I took him last night. I stripped him naked, and touched him, and took him, and he was tight and virgin, and his spend on my fingers was hot, and his moans of pleasure still echo in my mind.’

Caleb swayed a little, though he was unsure whether it was from shock at what he had done, or from not having slept for two nights. He wasn’t aware of being tired though. He had never felt more awake, more aware. 

Gideon rose from the table after sausage number four, and remarked, “This is a pretty poor show even by Seymour’s standards. He is going to come down and entertain his guests or am I going to have to go up there and remind him of his duty?”

Caleb smiled. “I wouldn’t recommend that, sir.”

Gideon shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time he shot at me, Hodgson. He used to do it all the time when we were kids.”

“How unfortunate, sir.”

“It’s alright, he didn’t mean it.”

“Oh?”

“I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Gideon glanced back at the table where the ladies were eating and bickering amongst themselves in a way they probably thought was discrete. It was possible, Caleb reflected, that the younger ladies were already competing for either Gideon, or Seymour’s affections. Two handsome, eligible, men…Caleb had seen it many times at those social occasions which even Seymour had been unable to avoid. 

Caleb earnestly hoped for the young ladies’ sake that none of them tried to lay their hands on his master. 

“I will go upstairs now,” Caleb said, wrenching his mind back to the matter at hand. “And suggest that his Lordship remember that he has guests.”

Gideon clapped him on the shoulder, “You’re a brave man, Hodgson. A brave man.”

 

Caleb climbed the staircase to the upper floors with weary legs. 

At some stage he really ought to sleep or there was a danger he would go a trifle mad. 

Or…well…madder. 

He must be at least somewhat unhinged to have lain with his master. Everyone knew how such stories always ended, even if the stories generally involved a male employer and _female_ servant. The servant lost their heart (assuming of course that the relationship was consensual and it wasn’t always) and then rapidly lost their place as either the master tired of her or realised the scandal they were risking. 

There could be no future for a romance across classes. 

‘But this isn’t a romance,’ Caleb told himself. ‘This is something else, something more.’

He knocked on Seymour’s door, “My Lord, may I come in?”

There was a short pause and then, “Alright.”

The room was dark as Seymour hadn’t drawn the curtains nor lit the lamps. 

And it still smelled of sex, despite the fact that his Lordship had clearly bathed. He stood in his trousers but his chest was bare and Caleb’s eyes fell at once to a pink mark around a pale nipple. 

He had bit him? He couldn’t remember doing that. 

“You needn’t lecture,” Seymour sighed. “I know I have guests and I’m coming. They threatened me with a trip to the coast this afternoon and I might as well. I can be irritated at the seaside just as easily as I can be irritated in my own home and at least there’s a chance someone will drown.”

Caleb wanted to laugh but felt like he couldn’t because the way Seymour was behaving, as if nothing had happened, had made Caleb freeze inside. 

“I will have them bring around the carriage, my Lord.” Caleb said, the last two words clearly and deliberately, challenging Seymour to remind him that when they were alone they were to be on first name terms. 

But Seymour said nothing about it. “Have Mrs Morris put some packed lunches together. We’ll probably be out until dinner.”

“Yes, sir.”

Seymour took the cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth, laid it carefully on the edge of an ashtray, and turned to him. “Not much of a valet, are you. Am I to dress myself?”

Caleb bit his lip against an angry retort and went to select a shirt. He noticed that his hands were shaking a little as he closed the cabinet drawer. 

Seymour watched him thoughtfully as Caleb buttoned and tucked. Caleb could feel the eyes on him, even though he didn’t look up. Being this close to Seymour’s body, but in the usual way of a servant, after what they had done, felt strange. 

“Caleb,” the voice came suddenly and Caleb jumped. 

He looked up, relief spreading through him. “You used my name,” he said.

“Humph,” There was a small smile playing about Seymour’s mouth. Caleb hoped that Seymour wouldn’t realise it was there and would let it play. “After the sinful things you did to me last night I don’t think you should look so shocked from just a name.”

Caleb blushed. He let his hands rest on Seymour’s waist. “I thought you were regretting it.”

Seymour shrugged. “Only in the sense that I suspect a long carriage journey sitting down will be rather tormenting.”

“Oh! You’re…you’re sore?”

“Of course I’m bloody sore, what did you expect?”

“I don’t know what I expected. I had never done that with anyone before,” Caleb admitted. 

“Lucky me,” Seymour leaned forward, face sardonic but hands sliding up Caleb’s neck to hold his face. “I got the _apprentice_ sodomite.”

Caleb laughed and then they were kissing, slowly, deep in the memories of last night. Caleb was convinced that Seymour remembered it too as their mouths moved together, but just to make sure Caleb whispered, “I can’t think of anything but what we did. I am walking in a dream.”

Seymour’s kissed lip curled. “How poetic.”

“Can I come to you again tonight?”

Seymour pushed him off, not roughly, but firmly. “I think not, not while I have guests in the house. Last night was reckless. There are too many people currently sleeping in bedrooms too close by.”

Caleb saw the sense of it but his heart sank nevertheless.

Seymour turned to pick up his cigarette and his gloves and went towards the door. 

“After all,” Seymour said over his shoulder, hand on the door handle. “If you fuck me like that again I can’t promise I’ll be quiet.”

 

With everyone out for a few hours Caleb took the opportunity for a nap in his private parlour.

He dreamt. 

Seymour was eating dinner alone and Caleb was in his usual place by the sideboard, watching. He watched for some time. Then he stopped watching. He pulled Seymour from his seat, tore down his trousers, and buggered him, hard. While Seymour moaned and jerked, tight and hot around Caleb’s cock. He forced himself as deep as he could and had his master until his master spent with a cry into Caleb’s hand.

And he lifted the hand to his mouth and licked it from his fingers. 

“Mr Hodgson?”

He started awake, erect, horror struck, to find Gael staring at him with pink cheeks and confused eyes. 

“Gael,” he choked, letting his arm fall to cover his groin. “I…”

“You was saying things, Mr Hodgson.” The boy’s eyes fell to the hearthrug. 

Caleb stomach churned. To be found out? This soon? “What was I saying?”

Gael’s blush intensified, answering Caleb’s question. 

“Oh Lord,” Caleb breathed, putting his head in his hands. “Gael…I…”

And then, of all things, a small hand started to hesitantly pat him on the head. Caleb looked up so fast that Gael started, snatched his hand away, and began yammering. “I’m sorry, Mr Hodgson! But you looked wretched like, and you don’t need to, honest! I won’t tell no one, although I don’t rightly understand why a man would want to fuck with another man.”

Caleb would have berated Gael for using such a crude word but didn’t feel he was in any position to take the moral high ground with the lad. “You really won’t tell anyone, Gael? Do you…understand what it would mean if you did?”

Gael nodded solemnly. “Buggers go to jail. Everyone knows that. I wouldn’t never let that happen to his Lordship, or to you, Mr Hodgson. Unless…” the boy’s face tightened suddenly as if an unwelcome thought had occurred to him. “He did _want_ it, didn’t he?”

Caleb sucked in a shocked breath. “Of course he did! I would never take someone forcibly, how could you even think…,” Caleb found that he was suddenly clutching the chair’s arms so tightly that his fingers hurt. To be accused of _that_. He felt ill.

“I dunno, I didn’t think you was a bad man like that Mr Hodgson. You’ve always been kind to me. It’s just,” Gael sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I thought you would do that, I’m sorry I thought it even for a second.”

Caleb let his fingers loosen, though he felt like the bones would crack apart from the tension in them. He rubbed his hands together. He had to admit that he was hurt that Gael would think such a frightful thing of him. “I thought you knew me, Gael.”

Guilt crossed Gael’s face. “I’m sorry! I am! It’s just back in the workhouse there were boys what had stories about men. Bad stories. And it’s one of the first things I remember, is them stories.”

Caleb blinked. Gael had never once referred to his past, not in three years. He had almost started to think of the boy as having sprung fully formed into the world, or found aged seven in a hedgerow.

“And they told me…” Gael shoved his hands in his pockets, defensively. “They said that…ah it don’t matter.” He bolted for the door but Caleb got there first.

“Gael,” he said, sternly, looking down into bewildered brown eyes. “Whatever stories you heard, whatever terrible examples you’ve been set, I want you to know that not everyone is like that. Not everyone takes selfishly. Many people come together in love.”

Gael, eyes wide, chewed on his lower lip. “I can’t imagine his Lordship _lovin’_ someone! I mean if you read him poetry or brought him a ribbon for his hair I reckon he’d just shoot you!”

Caleb flinched. “Granted, he is not the ribbon sort.”

Gael managed a small smile. “You’ll be kind to him, Mr Hodgson? Because he’s awful important to me, for saving me.”

“I promise, Gael.”

“And I promise to keep you and him secret. Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me!” Gael said, vehement. 

When he had gone Caleb was troubled. He himself had grown up in an institution, and a grim one at that, but it hadn’t been so lost to all human kindness that he had grown up thinking the way Gael did. Gael was only eleven years old but he had jumped straight from a realisation that sex had occurred, to wondering if it had been rapine. It made Caleb’s blood chill to think what sort of workhouse it must have been. There were bad workhouses all over, but a few scandals had emerged of particularly nasty places. Bad enough that they were eventually closed down. People still talked of the Andover scandal where the inmates had been so starved that they had taken to gnawing the bones they were supposed to be crushing for fertiliser. 

Gael was a mystery in so many ways. He seemed at once innocent and at the same time terribly not so. He was naive enough to think that there was a special school for butlers and yet he seemed horribly aware about forced sex. Enough to think it happened all the time. 

Caleb never would have dreamed that there could be somewhere worse than the orphanage. 

And of course, what had happened to Gael _after_ the workhouse had been even worse. Sometimes when Caleb closed his eyes he could still hear the banging and the screaming, and still see the incandescent rage on Seymour’s face. 

One other thing occurred to Caleb as he went to check on the laying out of the silver on the dining table.

He must never sleep in his parlour again. For fear of what he might say in his dreams.


	8. Chapter 8

They arrived back, tired, cheerful and smelling of salt and ozone, just as the sun was setting.

Well, Caleb corrected himself, _most_ of them were cheerful. Mr Lawrence was grinning broadly and had wet hair. Miss Margaret was giggling about how he had, ‘been like a merman! I never saw anyone look so at home in the sea!’ Miss Lucy had a basket full of shells and a dreamy expression. Miss Penelope was more subdued, which made Caleb wonder if she had met with a rebuff from Mr Lawrence. 

Lady Smythe glowed with exertion and even Miss Lawton was smiling, albeit wanly. 

Caleb chose not to inform either that they had seaweed on their hats. 

Seymour was less apparently enthused by the romance of the ocean and was grim faced as he alighted, informing Caleb shortly that they required dinner in an hour. 

Then he stalked off to his rooms, the limp hardly perceptible but enough to strike heat into Caleb’s stomach. 

“I don’t think he enjoyed the excursion,” Mr Lawrence observed, appearing at Caleb’s shoulder and bringing the smell of the sea. “But then, he never enjoys anything much.”

“I hope you had a pleasant afternoon, sir?” Caleb asked. He was pleased to find that expected pleasantries came out of his mouth in their accustomed way, even while his mind was committing terrible sexual crimes with his master, far, far, away. 

“Simply marvellous, Mr Hodgson.” Gideon grinned and ran a hand through his damp red hair. “Although I think I shocked Lady Smythe rather when I jumped into the water in just my breeches.” 

Caleb spluttered, and glanced at Lady Smythe who was bustling up the steps beyond them with a gleeful expression. “She appears to have recovered from her distress admirably, sir.”

Gideon’s eyes flashed mischief. “Yes, it’s impressive. She’s a resilient old bird.”

 

Everyone retired to their rooms to bathe and rest before dinner. Caleb supervised the final preparations for the meal, checked the condiments and wine selection one more time, closed the dining room windows against troublesome moths, and then met Mrs Morris below stairs to discuss the menus for Monday. 

“I am looking forward to having the house nice and quiet again,” Mrs Morris told him, rubbing her eyes with her handkerchief. “All these guests…it’s been like the old days but I forgot how tiring the old days were!”

Caleb smiled. “Lord Christopher enjoyed plenty of society. I fear that Lord Seymour does not.”

“No, indeed, Mr Hodgson,” Mrs Morris agreed. “And that’s very sad, I’m sure. But it’s easier on the servants. Although Kassandra always said she enjoyed being busy…”

Caleb felt his face tighten and an obvious mortification swept through Mrs Morris’s eyes. “Mr Hodgson, I’m so sorry…”

“Please don’t apologise Mrs Morris,” Caleb heard himself saying stiffly. “It’s been more than three years. I think it’s time for everyone to stop tiptoeing around it.”

Mrs Morris sighed and laid a gentle hand on Caleb’s arm. “We all loved her ever so much. She was such a good woman.”

“Yes,” Caleb replied. “Yes.”

 

It was some time before he regained his equilibrium. He had to take a few moments in his parlour to grip the mantelpiece and close his eyes. 

After all this time, sometimes just the mention of her name…

He wondered if he ought to feel faithless to her memory, now that he was embarked on this affair with Seymour, but Kassandra had loved him so dearly, accepted him so entirely, that he could not believe that she would want him to be alone now, for her sake. 

And besides, he thought bitterly, she had _chosen_ to leave him. Even if it was, in the end, his own fault, for letting the unnatural love between them grow, his own fault for lying with his sister, it had still been _her_ decision to throw herself into a swollen river.

He just wished…he just wished he could be sure. The unanswerable questions remained. Why had she done it? She had seemed happy. She had never shown guilt or shame about what they did, what they were. Of the two of them she had been the most at peace with it. She had regarded it as beyond their control. 

‘Love is love,’ she had said.

So why? Why would she get up one day and go to die? Something must have happened. Something must have made her change her mind.

Caleb had long ago become haunted by a dreadful possibility. That she had been with child by him, and unable to tell him, unable to go on knowing that she had condemned their unborn to such a start in life. 

And that had been why she did it.

But he would never know. 

 

By the time he went to dress Seymour for dinner he had succeeded in pushing it all into the bottom of his skull where it could resume the endless, circling, doubt and grief, and leave him comparatively sane in the rest of his mind. It was a method he had employed for several years, to allow himself to live life without her. It wasn’t a happy way to live but he had never expected happiness again.

And yet, here he was, at risk of a very real happiness, with Seymour of all people. 

How strange life was. 

Seymour was asleep on the sofa in his dressing room, a burnt hole (one of many) in the upholstery demonstrating that he had fallen asleep mid-cigarette. Again.

Caleb crouched down and brushed Seymour’s hair out of his eyes.

“One of these days you are going to burn the house down,” he said, quietly. 

A frown appeared between Seymour’s eyes but he didn’t wake, so Caleb ventured to kiss his mouth, gently. 

So soft…

Then abruptly he found himself thrown almost across the room, and Seymour was standing, panting, with wild eyes, and clenched fists. 

“It’s me!” Caleb exclaimed, spreading his hands. “What’s wrong?”

“Never do that again!” Seymour told him, angrily. “Never touch me when I’m asleep!”

“I’m sorry!”

“Swear it!”

“I swear!” Caleb moved forward and took one fisted hand, tried to pry the fingers open. Seymour’s pulse was fluttering in his wrist. “What’s the matter?”

“If you touch me when I’m sleeping, I can’t swear I won’t kill you,” Seymour told him, pulling his hand away. “I’ll kill you before I know it’s you.”

Caleb backed away, mind racing. The boy. The boy at school. 

Understanding must have shown on Caleb’s face because Seymour nodded and spat, “Yes. It’s a hell of a way to wake up, to find that happening to you.”

“Seymour…”

“Don’t feel sorry for me! I won’t be pitied by a…” Seymour stopped, breath caught.

For a moment they just stared at each other. 

‘By a servant,’ Caleb thought, miserably. ‘That’s what he was about to say. That he wouldn’t be pitied by a mere servant.’

He wasn’t surprised. They were having an affair but they weren’t lovers. He knew Seymour better than to expect that, or to expect it so soon. Seymour’s emotions were so contained, so hidden, like a puzzle box with a thousand corners, and Caleb feared that it would be the work of a lifetime to solve that puzzle. To make Seymour care. And to make him care about an inferior, a servant. ‘I’m beneath him,’ Caleb thought. 

“Stop that,” Seymour said, suddenly. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, hands visibly shaking. “Stop it. You’re thinking so loudly that half the building will hear.”

Caleb shrugged helplessly. 

Seymour made a frustrated noise and dragged on his cigarette, sitting down wearily on the sofa. Caleb hovered, unsure what to do, and rather afraid to touch him again. He had a sudden memory of Seymour when they’d first met. A perpetually angry, unsmiling, unhappy, fifteen year old. He’d been plagued by nightmares. 

“You know the story I am sure,” Seymour grated, taking out another cigarette to light it with the end of his previous one. “I know how they gossip below stairs.”

“The story about why you left Eton?” 

“Why I was expelled, you mean,” Seymour corrected him. “Yes. Well, I imagine that the servants have it pretty accurately.”

“I didn’t know you were asleep when he tried to…”

Seymour snorted. “He wasn’t a fool. I would _have_ to be asleep. I wouldn’t have let that piece of dirt anywhere near me if I knew it was happening.”

“And yet, you allowed me.” Caleb realised that he hadn’t appreciated last night what it had meant, how difficult it must have been, for Seymour to spread his legs for him. What he must have had to overcome. 

Seymour looked up at him, eyes no longer wild, face no longer angry, his rage come and gone with almost the same speed as his rare smiles. “I want you and that is the difference.”

Caleb moved without thought and was next to his master on the sofa, kissing him, hands in Seymour’s hair. 

They sank back, Seymour beneath him, all bone and skin and smooth muscle, pounding heart. Finally Caleb drew back, ignoring his erect body for the time being. “I don’t pity you,” he explained. “I would never presume to pity you.”

Seymour’s hard purple eyes seemed enormous from so close. He looked up at Caleb, cheeks flushed from their kissing. “And the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

Seymour rolled his eyes. “The look on your face when I almost said that I wouldn’t be pitied by a servant.” 

Caleb smiled ruefully. “I _am_ a servant. I cannot blame you if you are unable to forget that.”

Seymour went quiet, visibly thinking, and then, “My father always told me that when I’m wrong I had better say I’m wrong. He was a stubborn man and it took him at least fifteen years to get the idea into me but now I consider it a point of honour. So,” Seymour ground the words out as though they were hurting his teeth, “I shouldn’t have thrown you across the room. I shouldn’t have thrown your status in your face.”

Caleb blinked in surprise. He didn’t think he’d ever had such a reluctant apology before but he was grateful for even this much, aware of what it must cost a proud man like Seymour to make it. Despite Lord Christopher’s work Caleb suspected that the people Seymour had apologised to his life could be counted on one hand. Possibly not even on every finger of that hand. 

He nodded. Accepting it. 

They were about to resume kissing when the dinner gong went. 

“One of these days,” Seymour said. “I’m going to rip that damned thing right off the wall.”

 

Dinner passed without incident except that it was now clear to Caleb that Miss Penelope was most certainly offended and that Mr Lawrence was the cause. She picked at her food, occasionally casting baleful looks at him as he regaled the rest of the table with further tales of his travels. Once again, Caleb wondered why Mr Lawrence had failed to follow up on such a promising flirtation. In fact, the air of disappointment amongst the maids suggested that Mr Lawrence hadn’t followed up on _any_ flirtations. 

It was all most peculiar. 

Throughout dinner and throughout the evening of cards that followed Caleb did his duty as if nothing was untoward. He made drinks. He schooled his face to that of the politely interested servant. He made himself invisible. 

And he thought. He thought about Seymour’s past. About his own past. About the tangled mess of it all. And about the uncertain future. 

Finally it was time to turn down the lamps, summon the ladies’ maids to put their mistresses to bed, summon Eric, who was acting as Mr Lawrence’s valet, and then retire. It felt as if the day had been endless, acres of waiting punctuated by extraordinary outbursts from Gael and then from Seymour. And all of it hard on the heels of his first night making love to his master. Caleb knew it would be several days before he had settled it all in his mind.

If he ever could.

 

He ran Seymour’s bath and left him to take it unmolested, very aware that the limp had worsened throughout the day, and that his master winced on sitting down. While Seymour bathed (and smoked)   
Caleb put out his clothes for the next day and tried not to feel reproachful that he was going to his own lonely bed soon rather than joining Seymour in his. 

‘It can’t be _every_ night,’ he told himself, sternly. ‘He isn’t your wife.’

That thought, hitting his sleeplessness-crazed mind made him laugh helplessly to himself for some time, until Seymour’s voice made him stop.

“Have you gone quite mad? What are you doing laughing at nothing?”

Caleb turned and smiled at his master, who, dressing-gown clad, sat himself carefully down on the bed. “it’s just been that sort of day.”

“Hn,” Seymour agreed. “Yes. There has been much annoying drama all round. And Penelope started crying at the beach. It was insupportable.”

“Oh dear,” Caleb ventured to sit beside Seymour on the bed. 

“She rather threw herself at Gideon, or so I gathered. And he failed to reciprocate. I think he must be ill, or has found God. Nothing else could explain it. That, or he has finally overused it to the point where it has dropped off entirely.”

Caleb laughed. “It is very odd. He asked me to make excuses to Miss Penelope for him last night. He seemed keen to avoid her company. And the maids are very disappointed. He hasn’t laid a finger on any of them.”

“Hmm,” Seymour tangled his fingers in Caleb’s hair and turned his head. Caleb’s heart began pounding. “Enough about that fool. I have a question for you.”

“Yes?” Caleb asked. He was intensely aware of his master’s body so close to his, of the way the dressing-gown had slipped open to show his bitten nipple. 

“I’ve had a rather uncomfortable day, physically. It hurts like the very devil to sit down. Perhaps you would like to make that up to me in some way before you retire to bed.”

Caleb’s heart leapt. He ran his hands down the gap in Seymour’s dressing gown and pushed it open, off his shoulders, rendering him naked. He let his hands roam greedily over bare skin and a stiffening member. His own was so hard that he could barely breathe. “What did you have in mind?” he asked. 

Seymour shrugged. “Surprise me.”

Caleb couldn’t repress the triumphant grin he knew must be on his lips but before Seymour could admonish him for it he pushed his master onto his back, crouched over him, and kissed his mouth, his shoulders, his nipples, his stomach, listening to Seymour’s quickening breathing, letting the misunderstandings and revelations of the day fall away until there was only desire. 

Such desire. 

When he wrapped his mouth around Seymour’s cock Seymour gasped. Caleb thought how wonderful it was to know that he was the first to give such pleasure. Something in the way Seymour behaved when they were in bed had convinced Caleb that Seymour had never known any of this before. His general reactions, the jerking of his body, the desperate panting, gave away his inexperience. 

And reassured Caleb that whatever that boy at Eton had tried to do to Seymour, he hadn’t got very far. Which for the boy’s sake, was just as well.

“Dear god…” Seymour muttered, arching up and deeper into Caleb’s mouth, his voice laced with surprised pleasure. “Caleb… _harder_.”

Caleb moaned around him and obeyed. 

It wasn’t long before the sensation of Seymour in his mouth, the taste and smell and _feel_ of it, made Caleb’s own cock almost painful. He had to reach down and pull himself free of his clothes, stroking himself, moaning harder, slick and swollen in his own fist while Seymour thrust into his mouth.

It was like nothing he had ever experienced before.

“I’m going to…going to…” Seymour hissed, hips pumping rapidly.

Caleb smiled around him. If Seymour thought that this was Caleb’s cue to pull away then Seymour had no idea what a debauched man he had taken to his bed. Caleb was aroused beyond belief at the thought of Seymour spending in his mouth, wanted it. And Seymour had never even imagined that Caleb would want it, that much was obvious in the shuddered moan that followed the realisation that Caleb wasn’t going to finish it with his hand. Seymour climaxed in Caleb’s mouth, body arched, hands tight in Caleb’s hair, and Caleb swallowed gleefully, wallowing in something that most men would consider a degradation but which only made his cock jerk in his hand and weep with excitement. 

When it was over he was all set to stroke himself to completion but Seymour pulled out of his mouth, yanked him up beside him on the bed and pulled him against him. Caleb moaned and began to rub himself against Seymour’s hip, against his stomach, shamelessly pleasuring himself against Seymour’s naked body. Seymour’s heart was hammering against his ribs, felt through his sweat-damp chest and he was watching Caleb’s face with dazed eyes. 

“Spend on me,” Seymour whispered.

Caleb gasped at his words, climaxing suddenly and so hard that Seymour had to slap a hand over his mouth to muffle the cry. Caleb’s body moved without him, shaking with it, spurting onto Seymour’s stomach, lost in purely physical response. 

“Seymour…” he moaned under smoky fingers. “Seymour..”

 

Afterwards he couldn’t stop shaking and Seymour kissed him, no doubt tasting himself in Caleb’s mouth. Which seemed to prompt his next question.

“Why would you do such a thing?” Seymour asked, quietly. 

Ridiculously Caleb found himself blushing. “You mean swallow you?”

Seymour nodded.

“It was very arousing,” Caleb said, simply. He couldn’t explain why. It was beyond explanation.

“You’re a very strange man.”

“Maybe you might like to try it some time,” Caleb said, starting to smile.

Seymour laughed. “Don’t hold your breath.”

But he frowned thoughtfully, like a man who had a new idea to consider. 

Soon Caleb had to force himself from the bed, doing up his trousers, and once again leave. Somewhere a clock struck midnight. 

“I meant it when I said we shouldn’t lie together this evening,” Seymour observed, softly. “You undermined my good intentions.”

Caleb hoped he didn’t look as smug as he felt because really he oughtn’t to feel so triumphant that Seymour’s desire for him had overridden his good sense. And Caleb didn’t even like to think about Mr Lawrence in the next room, and what he could have heard. 

If they wanted this affair to continue they had better both learn self control.

But, looking down at Seymour, naked, with Caleb’s seed on his stomach, Caleb feared that self control was nothing but a distant memory.


	9. Chapter 9

Caleb was faintly appalled (although not in the least surprised) at Seymour’s almost total failure to hide his pleasure at the departure of his guests. He waved off Lady Smythe with particular enthusiasm and Caleb thought that he might have heard a muttered, “And don’t come back, you frightful old biddy.”

At least one of the young ladies angled none-too-subtly for an invitation to return, hopefully without her rivals, although it wasn’t clear to Caleb whether the young ladies were aiming at Seymour’s or Gideon’s heart. Perhaps either would do. Seymour was of course immune to such blandishments and Caleb was glad to know that, whatever Lady Smythe’s advice, Seymour had no imminent plan to marry. Even if that _would _save the estate from financial ruin. The young ladies left with downcast faces, resolutely discouraged in whatever romantic aspirations they held either by Seymour’s refusal to acknowledge that he was being flirted with, or by Gideon’s refusal to act on flirting already having taken place.__

__Gideon was the last to go._ _

__

__Caleb was on his way up the stairs to check that the guest rooms had been properly cleaned and the dust sheets put down (preparatory to Seymour’s next semi-annual house party, if there was one) when he passed the small gallery and overheard two voices. One was angry so was inevitably Seymour’s. The other was Mr Lawrence’s._ _

__Caleb paused and listened, out of sight on the turn of the stair._ _

__“That, Lawrence, is none of your damned business.”_ _

__“Alright, don’t storm off to the gun cabinet! I won’t tell the world, you know I can keep secrets. Just…put me out of the agony of curiosity, old chap, and at least tell me which one it was.”_ _

__Stony silence from Seymour._ _

__“Alright, keep your secrets. I’d like to think that you’re doing it to be respectful to her but I’m pretty sure that you’re just being a miserable bastard as usual. You know I’m intrigued and want to see me suffer.”_ _

__“Caleb thinks I can’t get into the gun cabinet since he changed the locks last week. _He’s wrong_.”_ _

__“Humph. Well, perhaps if you want to keep your dalliances so secret you would be better not having them quite so loudly. I heard you last night. It sounded like you were having a marvellous time with _someone_.”_ _

__There was movement and then the sound of something breaking. Caleb froze in indecision, wondering if he should run up the stairs to stop the altercation but frightened that doing so would prove that he had been eavesdropping. He was having trouble thinking clearly now that he understood that Gideon had overheard them._ _

__How lucky that Gideon had assumed that Seymour was with a woman._ _

__How painfully lucky._ _

__And how stupid they had been._ _

__Just as Caleb heard what might be a vase go over and smash on the floor and was about to risk exposure to prevent any further damage, Gideon laughed and a moment later he appeared on the stairs. He saw Caleb, grinned, and rubbed at his bloody nose with a handkerchief._ _

__“Excuse me, Hodgson. A vase appears to have been somewhat destroyed. His Lordship and I were merely reliving old times as children when I used to visit.”_ _

__“Mr Lawrence, I… Are you alright?” Caleb had broken out in a cold sweat but he forced a stiff smile onto his face._ _

__“Quite alright, Hodgson. In fact I’ll be off in half an hour if you can have my horse brought round.”_ _

__“Yes sir,” Caleb nodded._ _

__He ran back downstairs to inform the stable and to tell Eric that Mr Lawrence’s valise needed packing, and then he ran back upstairs with a dustpan and brush._ _

__He found Seymour leaning against the wall of the gallery, under a portrait of King Charles, smoking crossly. Wordlessly Caleb started to brush up the remains of a fortunately not-very-expensive vase (although it was still worth his wages for an entire year)._ _

__“He heard us,” Seymour told him, in a flat tone of voice._ _

__“We can’t talk about that here!” Caleb hissed, quickly. He’d overheard a conversation in the gallery. Anyone else could do the same. They _had_ to start being more careful._ _

__Seymour bristled at being cut off so unceremoniously and opened his mouth, no doubt to retort something along the lines of, ‘you’re a servant so don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do,’ but then he shut his mouth again, nodded curtly, and stalked away._ _

__Caleb sighed and took the remains of the vase, the shattered pile of what had been previously beautiful, downstairs._ _

__

__Seymour put in a brief appearance to glare his goodbyes to Gideon but apart from that Caleb didn’t see his master until dinner. He told himself that Seymour was still his employer and really nothing had changed (in their day time lives at least) and what had he expected? Had he thought that Seymour would sit with him in the library or the study? Had he thought that they would dine together?_ _

__Had he allowed himself for even a moment to forget what he was was, and what Seymour was, and how no matter what they did together in the dark, they were still as far apart as two people could be?  
‘I must have’, Caleb thought wretchedly, as he locked away the silver in his pantry, or he wouldn’t be so surprised now by Seymour’s behaving exactly as usual. On a normal day without guests (which was virtually every day) Seymour was almost always alone. He preferred it. Even as a youth he had spent hours holed up in the library reading, or afternoons stalking the grounds by himself, rather than troubling his father or making work for the servants. _ _

__He was actually quite popular (amongst those members of staff who had got used to his temper and hadn’t handed in their notice in their first week) for that very reason. A self-contained, cerebral, employer was much less difficult for servants than someone outgoing and rugged, who might always be inviting people to stay, or hosting huge hunting parties._ _

__Often whole days passed when they only saw Seymour at meals._ _

__Caleb had used to like that freedom too. It had given him more free time than a man in his position would usually have. He had been able to study, or do inventory, or, recently, teach Gael._ _

__But now when he did those things he was distracted, his mind always whirring._ _

__‘Will he let me stay with him tonight?’ Caleb wondered._ _

__Seymour did not._ _

__In fact, a week passed with no sign between them at all that they were anything more than a master and a butler. Even when Caleb undressed him at night things were just as one might expect. No inappropriate contact. No meaningful glances. Seymour spoke (if he spoke at all) of the estate as usual. Caleb answered in outward calmness._ _

__He considered tugging Seymour against him and kissing him._ _

__He considered it many times._ _

__But he had known his master for years, was famed for understanding his master’s moods, and Seymour was practically radiating a forced normalcy so that Caleb was sure that any attempt at physical intimacy would be rejected. Perhaps Gideon’s nearly happening on the truth had caused Seymour to repent, Caleb worried. Perhaps Seymour had decided to retrieve the control Caleb had been so sure that they had lost._ _

__Perhaps it was all over._ _

__He tried not to even consider that it might all be over._ _

__But at night it was all he considered. And he didn’t sleep._ _

__

__Eight days after the last time Caleb had gone to his master’s bed it was Caleb’s afternoon off. He was sure that if he stayed in the house another minute he would go stark staring mad so he borrowed a bicycle from the gardener and took himself into Bristol on the train. He told himself that this decision was entirely unconnected to the fact that his Lordship had taken the train to Bristol himself that morning._ _

__‘Where has he gone?’ Caleb thought, as he sat in Second Class and watched the countryside puff by. “His club, or the bank, or the booksellers?”_ _

__But all the while Caleb thought such comparatively reasonable thoughts he also thought, ‘ _Why hasn’t he turned to me again? Everything he said implied more than a few nights. Everything he did showed his pleasure in what we did and his passion for me. Why has it all stopped?__ _

__On the seat opposite a small child whispered to its mother about the ‘scary man with the smile.’_ _

__Caleb was horrified that his feelings were showing through the mask and quickly corrected his facial expression. Control. It was all about control. Hadn’t he learnt that years ago? And hadn’t he chastised Seymour for not being controlled enough, careful enough?_ _

__Well, he’d got what he had wanted!_ _

__Seymour was being all too careful now._ _

__

__By the time he got to Bristol he was thoroughly cross with himself for his monotonous, obsessive, thoughts, and, giving himself a mental slap, he went to the Natural History Museum to admire the reptile skeletons, and then to a lecture at the Methodist Hall._ _

__Afterwards however he had to pay a penny for the accompanying leaflet because he realised that he hadn’t heard a word of it and didn’t know what it had actually been about. He was disheartened to see that the leaflet included several words he didn’t know. He had better redouble his efforts with the dictionary._ _

__Sometimes he felt as though he could never make up for all the education he had missed, despite his carefully formed speech (‘aping your betters,’ they had sneeringly called it at the orphanage) and despite all the books he read. It wasn’t easy to educate yourself._ _

__He stepped out of the floor polish and dark wood-smelling hall into late afternoon sunshine. The streets were dusty and full of people, all was noise and dirt and horses. Women’s skirts pressing past him on the crowded pavements and errant children underfoot._ _

__One little boy ran slap bang into Caleb’s leg as it was bursting out of a sweet shop._ _

__“Sorry mister!” it cheerfully piped before running off again, clutching a bag of something no doubt dreadful for the teeth._ _

__Caleb was smiling to himself at this when he himself walked slap bang into someone else._ _

__“Mr Lawrence!”_ _

__Gideon coloured until he nearly matched his hair and stammered, “Mr Hodgson, er…”_ _

__“Forgive me for walking into you,” Caleb said._ _

__“Don’t mention it, the streets are very crowded today. Er…” Gideon shuffled to one side as a woman in an enormous hat walked by him. “Are you coming from the Methodist Hall?”_ _

__“Yes, sir. I’ve been to a lecture.”_ _

__“What was the subject?” Gideon asked, with an odd sort of desperation in his voice._ _

__Caleb frowned. Why was Mr Lawrence so embarrassed? “The subject was The Reformation of the Soul.”_ _

__Apparently… Not that he had actually heard any of it, due to being caught up with worrying about Seymour…_ _

__If it was possible, Gideon’s blush deepened. Caleb started to be concerned that the man was unwell._ _

__“Dash it all,” Gideon muttered to himself, and then he was taking hold of Caleb’s arm and firmly pulling him into a side alley, much to Caleb’s amazement._ _

__“Mr Lawrence? Are you quite alright?”_ _

__The alley was quieter than the main street but it smelled distressingly of toilets. Mr Lawrence took his hat off and started nervously turning it in his long fingered hands. “See here, Mr Hodgson. I’d be grateful if I could rely on your discretion about something and perhaps even…advise me.”_ _

__Caleb’s mouth fell open before he could stop it. Mr Lawrence was confiding in _him_? Asking advice of _him_? “Well, certainly, sir. If I can help in any way…”_ _

__Gideon sighed. “Thing is, Hodgson, I’m on my way to the Methodist Hall myself.”_ _

__“Oh…yes?”_ _

__Gideon coughed. “I don’t suppose you’ve much recollection of the young lady who gave the lecture?”_ _

__The penny dropped. Audibly. Caleb hid a smile. “I dimly recall that she was quite pretty and very intelligent, sir.” He had noticed that much before his mind drifted firmly away from thoughts of women, pretty or otherwise._ _

__Gideon gave him a rueful smile. “You might also remember helping me to gently let down a young lady who I won’t name on the street. The lecturer today is the reason I chose to forgo that other ladies ample charms.”_ _

__“I understand entirely, sir.”_ _

__Gideon ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve got myself into rather a pickle, Hodgson. I rather think I might love the young lady but she’s a very serious, worthy, sort and, to be frank, she doesn’t think much of me.”_ _

__“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to meet?” Caleb didn’t think that Methodistical young ladies intent on reforming souls spent much time in the gentlemen’s clubs and fashionable houses that Mr Lawrence frequented._ _

__Gideon grimaced. “I went to one of her lectures as a forfeit after I lost a wager, and she heard about it and gave me a fearful telling off afterwards. Then she set about reforming me but I’m afraid all she achieved was to make me fall in love with her, which wasn’t her plan at all.”_ _

__Caleb couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop the smile._ _

__Gideon smiled back. “I know, it’s farcical. But it’s too late now. I’ve fallen hard and I’d like to marry her, but she knows all about me and doesn’t consider me a very good prospect. I’ve tried telling her that I’m a new man. That I’ll never sin again, but she doesn’t seem to believe me.”_ _

__‘Of course not,’ Caleb thought, ‘because she’s met you.’_ _

__“Sir, might I suggest that rather than giving her guarantees of your future behaviour that she may not believe, that you focus instead on her?”_ _

__“How so?”_ _

__“Tell her why you’ve fallen in love with her.”_ _

__“I have! I’ve told her she’s beautiful a thousand times! She’s impervious!”_ _

__“With respect sir, all the young ladies you’ve pursued have been beautiful. What is it about this young lady that is different?”_ _

__Gideon’s eyes took on an alarming dreaminess that for a moment Caleb was afraid was the precursor to a dead faint, but it turned out to be romance._ _

__He hadn’t thought Mr Lawrence capable of sincere romance!_ _

__“She’s a smashing girl! She’s clever and good and she does charitable works. I’ve never met a woman with so many ideas and opinions and who I’d like to talk to just as much as I’d like to…er…I mean, she’s terribly forthright. She believes in votes for women and the equality of all and when she talks about it you can see a…a brighter world.” Mr Lawrence suddenly seemed to hear himself and ground to a halt, looking mortified._ _

__Caleb felt moved. He’d always suspected that the world had underestimated Gideon Lawrence and here was the proof._ _

__“And all of that is exactly what you should tell her,” he said, gently. “I think she might like that more than being told that she’s beautiful.”_ _

__“Really?” Gideon put his hat back on with a grim sort of determination. “Interesting…”_ _

__Caleb had a feeling that telling women they were beautiful had always worked for Mr Lawrence in the past._ _

__When they emerged into the street again Caleb found his hand clasped in a warm handshake, and Gideon’s always cheering smile turned upon him in full force._ _

__“Thank you for the advice, Mr Hodgson.”_ _

__“You’re very welcome, sir,” Caleb replied, his turn to blush now. Being thanked so warmly after such a candid conversation wasn’t an experience he’d had with someone of Gideon’s class before and he wasn’t quite sure how to take it. “Good luck.”_ _

__“Where are you off to now?”_ _

__“I think I’ll take some refreshment and then go home by the evening train,” Caleb said._ _

__“You might see Seymour,” Gideon observed, eyes already moving past Caleb, to the Methodist Hall, already thinking what he would say to his young lady no doubt. “He’s in town too. I bumped into him at the Club.”_ _

__“Yes, sir. Perhaps.”_ _

__

__Or perhaps not._ _

__

__It was nine o clock before Caleb arrived back at the house. His feet hurt and he was quite desperate to wash his hands but he was proud that he’d done something productive on his afternoon off, rather than spending it mooning about the house._ _

__Gael came bounding into his parlour just as he was having a cup of tea and going through the books he had bought from a second hand shop._ _

__“Evening, Mr Hodgson! Did ya have a nice afternoon off?”_ _

__“Yes thank you, Gael. Did you enjoy your supper?”_ _

__“We had beef wellington!”_ _

__“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”_ _

__Gael grinned at him. “Oh, and there’s a message for ya. I nearly forgot. His Lordship got me by the ear when I was changing the candles and said that when you got back you was to see him in the library. I’m sorry about ‘im seeing me. I know I’m supposed to be all quiet when I’m above stairs but I didn’t know he was there! Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in.”_ _

__Caleb put his books to one side and swallowed his agitation along with the last sip of his tea. “Thank you, Gael. I will attend on his Lordship now.”_ _

__“Can I look at your books, Mr Hodgson? I’ve got clean hands!” Gael was hopping from foot to foot._ _

__“Certainly,” Caleb said. “You might like the one about ancient reptiles.” He didn’t add that he suggested that one because it had colour pictures and he was quite sure that the actual text of any of the books was beyond Gael at the moment._ _

__“Thanks Mr Hodgson!”_ _

__

__Outside the library Caleb took a breath, preparing himself for disappointment yet again._ _

__He was starting to accept that what he wanted from Seymour was not going to be forthcoming. They were servant and master. They might never be more again. And yes, Caleb resented that all decisions on their intimacy (or otherwise) belonged to Seymour as his better, but Caleb couldn’t press his attentions on Seymour more vigorously._ _

__Not now that he knew exactly what had happened to Seymour at Eton._ _

__

__He found Seymour sat by the unlit fire with the evening newspaper and a brandy._ _

__“My Lord,” Caleb said._ _

__Seymour turned a page of the newspaper. “I hope you had a pleasant afternoon off.”_ _

__Caleb blinked. “Yes, very pleasant, thank you.”_ _

__Seymour put the paper to one side, drained his brandy glass, and stood up. His purple-blue eyes raked across Caleb’s face._ _

__Caleb’s heart started thudding._ _

__Seymour walked towards him, bringing the smell of cigarettes and brandy and newspaper print. “So, Mr Hodgson, have we been careful enough this week, do you think?”_ _

__“C…Careful?”_ _

__Seymour reached him where Caleb had backed up against the door, and stood an inch from Caleb’s trembling body. One of Seymour’s hands came up to rest against the door, his arm brushing Caleb’s ear. Caleb could only stare into those beautiful eyes, like a painting of something holy._ _

__“Have we restrained ourselves enough this week to prove we can do it, and now may we indulge ourselves?” Seymour asked him, softly._ _

__Caleb couldn’t stop himself. He leaned forward and kissed Seymour hungrily and found himself instantly kissed back._ _

__Hunger and brandy and Seymour’s warm lips._ _

__Seymour’s soft tongue against his, making Caleb shiver from his toes to the crown of his head, while his heart sang with relief._ _

__“I thought you didn’t want me,” Caleb breathed when Seymour pulled away._ _

__Seymour raised a blonde eyebrow. “Quite the contrary, I assure you. But what you said in the gallery chastened me. You were right. I shouldn’t have said anything there, where we could be overheard, especially after we had already so nearly compromised ourselves with Gideon.” Seymour kissed him again, mouths moving harder, faster, and Seymour’s hands on Caleb’s hips, and Caleb stiff between his thighs._ _

__He should probably be angry that Seymour hadn’t made himself clearer, had explained rather than putting Caleb through a week of such painful doubt, but he knew that Seymour wasn’t one for explaining himself._ _

__And Caleb couldn’t be angry when he was this happy._ _

__He might try to be angry about it in the morning._ _

__Possibly._ _

__

__That night he went to Seymour and they locked the door and took advantage of all the nearby rooms being empty of guests._ _

__He found Seymour already naked under the sheets._ _

__Waiting for him._ _

__Caleb kissed, and stroked, triumphing in every gasp of pleasure, every jerk of Seymour’s hips showing need._ _

__And he almost climaxed too soon when Seymour pushed him roughly to his back and sat astride him. The oil was slick and warm in Seymour’s body as he took Caleb in, tight, deep, _deeper_ , so that Caleb bit his lip and clutched at Seymour’s thighs to make him still for a moment. So that Caleb could endure the waves of sensation, as they rolled and peaked in his flesh. It was almost agonising. Almost unendurable. For a few breaths all was silent, suspended, they only stared at each other, hearts hammering._ _

__Then Seymour leaned down and bit softly at Caleb’s lower lip, breaking the spell. Caleb growled into his clenched teeth and began to thrust upwards._ _

__Seymour caught his breath and braced both hands on the pillow by Caleb’s head. A strange echo of the library earlier._ _

__Seymour jerked down to meet each push, his hard cock moving smoothly in Caleb’s oiled hand._ _

__“Yes, yes, yes,” Caleb whispered, as Seymour bent his head so that their brows nearly touched, as they coupled eagerly, quickly, His passage was hot and close and Seymour’s eyes were closed in pleasure above him. Caleb rubbed faster at Seymour’s cock, sure he himself wouldn’t hold out much longer, and wanting more than anything to climax together._ _

__And then, at last, _there_. _ _

__Their mouths met instinctively to muffle their moans, a last concession to decency, before all thought of care fled, burnt through by release._ _

__Caleb arched upwards one final time, filling Seymour’s body with his seed, just as Seymour’s own hit Caleb’s chest in hot streaks. Seymour’s arms seemed to give out as he shook and sobbed for breath, and he collapsed on Caleb, heedless of the mess. Caleb put both arms around him and held on tight, inhaling the scent of sex and the dizzyingly arousing smell of Seymour’s sweat._ _

__Determined that he wouldn’t let go._ _

__The last week had proved that this was going to be more difficult even than he had feared._ _

__But Caleb was never going to let go._ _


	10. Chapter 10

Caleb placed the book gently on the table and looked at it. 

‘He overestimated you,’ Caleb thought. ‘Or perhaps it simply didn’t occur to him.’

On the whole, and all things considered, Caleb didn’t believe that Seymour would deliberately embarrass him by giving him a book that did nothing but emphasise his ignorance. Seymour had perhaps thought as most privileged people thought, assuming that everyone had the knowledge he had, that everyone literate must be able to do the things he did. 

Caleb sighed. 

He wished, he _wished_ that he was Seymour’s equal. True, he had always yearned to be educated, he had always had ideas above his station, but now there was an added desire to be worthy of his lover. He wanted to understand everything Seymour said, to catch literary references first time, to know the difference between Renaissance art and Baroque, to be able to compare Shakespeare to Marlowe, Dickens to Bronte. 

He wanted to be truly educated rather than just have the appearance of it. 

‘I know very little really,’ he thought, gazing down at the offending book, with its occasional, incomprehensible, Latin quotes and cruelly un-translated bits of French verse, “I merely speak as though I swallowed a dictionary.’

Which wasn’t far from the truth. He had studied dictionaries all his life, foolishly believing at first that knowing words was the same as knowing _things_. By the time he had worked out that ‘knowing’ also included facts, and ideas, and learned judgement, and _everything_ else, he’d already been in service and time to study must be frequently sacrificed to exhausted sleep. His life had been an endless drudge and books an occasional luxury. By the time Kassandra had died he had already started to fear that no amount of reading would ever compensate for his lack of real schooling, that he would never overcome how he had been raised. 

What was he to say to Seymour? Should he try to fudge it? To act as though he had understood and enjoyed the book rather than been bewildered by it? Seymour wanted his opinion. He respected Caleb’s opinion. It had been one of the first things that had brought them together more than was usual for men of their different classes. Talking of books had been the start of their friendship. Caleb didn’t want to lie about, or to fake, something so important to them. 

But neither did he want Seymour to realise that Caleb wasn’t nearly as erudite as he appeared. 

 

The smell of autumn was in the air and Caleb was feeling the familiar surge of grief at the memory of what autumn meant. He wondered if he would always now associate the season with Kassandra’s death. When he was a child he had used to like it when the leaves began to fall (despite the fact the it heralded winter and so shivering and even possible starvation) but now all it made him think of was a swollen river and _loss_.

A hand touched Caleb’s arm and he was startled out of his thoughts to find his master stood beside him, frowning. 

“Caleb?” Seymour asked, taking the glass of brandy that Caleb had poured some time ago but apparently forgotten to actually carry across the study to its intended recipient. 

Caleb blushed, realising that he must have been stood there, glass in hand, thoughts mired in dark self indulgence, all that time while Seymour waited for his drink. 

“Forgive me,” Caleb mumbled, earnestly examining his shoes. “My mind was elsewhere.”

Seymour sat back down in his preferred chair by the fire and snorted. “Evidently. I’ve never known brandy to take so long to get from decanter to its rightful place,” he sipped at his drink, “Which is to say, to me.”

Dinner was long over, it was late, and there was no reason for them to be disturbed by any other servant, so Caleb thought he could risk sitting down in the other chair, hugging his serving tray, and saying, “It is a troubling time of year for me.”

Seymour nodded and regarded him over the rim of his glass, impossible eyes reflecting golden liquids. “I know.”

Being Seymour, he didn’t seem to consider any other comment necessary, which was something about him that Caleb liked very much. Others might have produced distressing platitudes about grief, and Heaven (where, after what they had done, he knew that Kassandra couldn’t possibly be), or acceptance. Caleb didn’t wish to hear such things and Seymour didn’t say them, he just acknowledged it all and respected Caleb’s private suffering. He didn’t force confidences. He didn’t try to comfort. 

“Just don’t fall too far down the rabbit hole or I shall be forced to come in and get you,” Seymour added. 

Caleb met the wryly smiling eyes and remembered Seymour’s own bleak misery on the anniversary of his father’s death in the summer and Caleb’s attempt to pull him from it.

He rather thought that Seymour remembered it too and that this was his characteristically off-hand way of thanking him. 

And had that day really been before they became lovers? Caleb found it hard in some ways to remember a time when they hadn’t been lovers, even though it had only been three months. The thought of it, of their three months of touching and stroking and Seymour’s spread legs and Caleb’s mouth raw from kisses, made a curl of heat coil in Caleb’s belly. 

And it was such a blessed relief to feel that heat amidst the coldness of the memory of _her_.

“Well, if you’re going to sit yourself down like you own the place you might as well have a brandy,” Seymour remarked, apropos of nothing, jumping Caleb out of his thoughts once again. 

“Oh!” The hair stood up excitedly on the back of his neck. Drinking with his master in the study! As if they were two gentlemen together! “If I may?”

Seymour waved vaguely at the decanter and draped himself over his seat, smoking luxuriously and shaking his own half empty glass in a meaningful fashion. 

Caleb got up, poured himself a drink and then topped up Seymour’s. He resumed his seat and they drank in companionable silence for awhile, listening to the wind blowing outside the window leads. 

Finally Caleb said, “I have a confession to make. I couldn’t finish the book you lent me.”

“Oh,” Seymour asked, voice drifting lazily upwards wreathed in smoke, “Dull, was it?”

“I…I couldn’t understand it.” Caleb took a breath. “It was above me.”

Seymour peered at him. “How so?”

“The French passages and the Latin quotations. I don’t read either language, and to be truthful my lord, I mean Seymour, some of the English words were unfamiliar too.” Caleb sipped at his drink. There. He had done it. Seymour was important enough to him to deserve honesty. He just hoped it wouldn’t lessen Seymour’s respect for him.

Seymour gave him a long, thoughtful, look before finally saying, “Fair enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for, exactly? There isn’t a law against not reading Latin. And we’ve fought rather a lot of wars to avoid our ever being in a situation in this country where there’s a law against not being able to read French.”

Caleb laughed into his brandy which resulted in an unfortunate spluttering. When he wiped his eyes he saw Seymour almost-grinning at him. 

“That’s a…very interesting explanation for Anglo-French history over the past thousand years,” Caleb ventured. 

Seymour shrugged. “It’s as good a reason as any. Although, as I recall, my history master didn’t much care for it as a theory. He told me to stop being so sarcastic.”

Caleb thought that one might as well tell the earth to stop spinning. 

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed midnight. 

“I do…I do wish I were more educated,” Caleb blurted suddenly. He later decided that the unaccustomed brandy had gone to his head. He rarely had anything stronger than ale. 

“How far did you get?” Seymour asked, bluntly. 

“The orphanage had a school up to the age of twelve and which stopped at a very basic literacy and mathematics,” Caleb said, wondering if his bitterness was evident in his voice. “We weren’t expected to have futures that would require more. Everything else I’ve tried to teach myself but it’s difficult with no guide and with my work.”

“I see,” Seymour stood and stretched. “Perhaps if I had known that there were frustrated academics like you out there amongst the domestic staff, aching for knowledge, I would have appreciated my own opportunities more.”

Caleb’s head snapped up, wondering if he was being mocked, but he saw that Seymour’s face was serious. He had meant it exactly as he’d said it. “Most of the upper classes assume that we would be too stupid to make use of any opportunities.”

“Balls,” Seymour retorted emphatically. “That’s what scholarships are for. Someone should have given you one.”

 

What Seymour had told him ought to have been comforting, and in a way he _was_ comforted, but Caleb’s true reaction was anger. Anger that he had spent his youth scrubbing pots, blacking boots, serving at table, while other young men by mere virtue of the family they were born into spent their youth studying, learning, exploring the world. They could become anything. Caleb and Kassandra had known that they had very narrow futures and that rising as high as they did in service was the best they could hope for. 

Not that Caleb felt shame for being in service. It was a respectable job and as butler he had reached its pinnacle. 

But he did feel increasing resentment that he’d had no choice in the matter. No other possible destiny. The injustice began to gnaw at him but he couldn’t confide in anyone, least of all Seymour who would never be able to understand. 

He tried to push it all from his mind, to dump it down into the dark where his memories of Kassandra usually abided, with the memories of the orphanage, and all the other things in his life which ought to have been different. 

 

Erik had given in his notice to go home. It happened often due to the exhausting and never-ending nature of being in service. Erik felt he would be happier on the farm despite his father’s dreams of a butler in the family. Caleb let him go, graciously. He would never condemn someone for not wanting the life. It was a hard life. 

Unfortunately they had needed a new footman. 

In the past Caleb had always been very skilled at hiring new staff. With the exception of Millie who could be a trifle cruel, he had only employed pleasant, hard-working, respectful people. Certainly Gael could be a handful but, technically, Caleb had not employed him. Gael had simply _arrived_. 

When he had interviewed William he had been impressed. He seemed highly suitable for the position and Caleb had only positive memories of their first encounter. 

However, later, as William’s character became clearer to the household Caleb started to fear that his usual good judgement had escaped him on this occasion, possibly due to the fact that the previous evening he had lain with Seymour and so was tired, blissful, and very aware of a bite mark on his shoulder. Perhaps in such a state Caleb hadn’t give William his full attention.

But he was giving it now and he saw that William was proud. Not proud in the good sense but in the sense of thinking himself superior to his position and due much greater responsibility and respect than he had yet earned. It set Caleb’s teeth on edge. He himself had worked hard over fifteen years to reach a place that William seemed to think his by right. Caleb had never thought himself too good for any task (he felt that _no one_ was too good for any task, no matter how high or mighty, if their life called them to do it) but William was palpably disdainful of some of his duties and overly keen to ingratiate himself with anyone who would advance his career. 

As soon as he realised that Caleb wasn’t one of them he had settled to a cool politeness that never quite gave Caleb the excuse to berate him but was still less than a butler was owed by his footman. It was a daily aggravation. 

And then there was the way William spoke when he was speaking to his betters. 

Caleb was waiting at dinner one evening as Seymour dined with his disliked cousin Mr George Smythe (who had descended upon them in a thunderous storm that evening, a storm still raging outside so that even Seymour’s minimal hospitality couldn’t quite endure to throw him out again) and listening to William embarrass himself and his entire class. Which, of course, included Caleb.

Mr George had condescendingly asked William how he was getting on, remarking that his mother had observed Lord Seymour’s trouble keeping servants and required a report. Seymour had rolled his eyes at this. Lady Smythe, Caleb had noticed, was quite skilled at annoying Seymour when she wasn’t even in the same county.

William had replied, “I am superratively happy in my position, Mr Smythe.”

Mr George had blinked, “Ah? I am…pleased to hear that.”

Caleb cringed. He thought that William had probably meant, ‘superlatively.’ Mr George looked bemused and Seymour mildly contemptuous (although, to be fair, Seymour almost always looked liked that).   
Just as Caleb was about to manufacture an excuse to send William to the kitchens for something Mr George asked another question. 

“So, are you a local lad, William?”

“No, Mr Smythe. I originated in Liverpool and was reared in London, adjacent to a most superior gasworks.”

Mr George bit his lip and went red. Realising that he was going to lose the battle and start laughing Caleb swiftly steered William from the room and firmly suggested that he take the unopened wine bottle back to the cellar. William glared at him, perhaps thinking that he had been having a nice chat with Mr Smythe, but went without complaint. 

It wasn’t that Caleb cared particularly that William was making a spectacle of himself in his attempt to sound high class, it was that William’s doing so made them _all_ seem ridiculous. Every servant who tried to read and learn and be better than he was, was considered by some employers to be no better than William. They made no distinction between ignorant social climbers and those who truly yearned for a life beyond the kitchen sink. 

Caleb paused outside the door of the dining room to compose his face and overheard, 

“Good grief, Seymour! You’ve got a most entertaining chap there! Thinks himself a scholar, I’d be bound. I suppose he’ll be alright as footman if he doesn’t speak!” 

Seymour didn’t reply.

“Where _do_ they get these jumped up little men? Watching one of that sort trying to be a gentleman is like watching a dog walking on its hind legs. They can’t possibly realise how nonsensical they sound.”

Caleb leaned his forehead against the door for a moment. 

Had anyone ever thought such things about him? It was probable. Back when he was barely out of the orphanage he might well have made similar comments, though surely not so pompously. He wondered if Seymour had ever noticed.

He wondered if Seymour was comparing them, him and William. Seeing the similarities. 

And he also wondered if he would survive the rest of the meal without kicking Mr George Smythe in the backside.

 

The storm was so dreadful, such a cacophony of explosive thunder and howling wind, that there was no question of Mr George leaving. The maids prepared a guest room as far from Seymour’s as possible and Seymour pointedly retired early, perhaps to avoid any more of his cousin’s society than necessary. Mr Tillworthy had told Caleb that as children Mr George had once said something (no one knew what) to his Lordship that had resulted in Seymour tying the boy upside down to the branch of a tree and leaving him there for five hours.

Caleb went to perform his valet duties, sadly convinced that with company in the house Seymour wouldn’t risk their lying together, not since Mr Gideon had overheard them. 

He found Seymour smoking in the window seat, curtains drawn, watching the lightning outside. He had the lamps off and the fire banked.

“Why are you sat here in the dark,” Caleb asked, softly. 

Seymour shrugged. “Without the light behind me I can watch the storm without it watching me.”

Caleb ventured to walk towards him and sit down on the unoccupied half of the window seat. They watched the storm together for some minutes, enjoying the drama, the power, the way the world seemed on the edge of explosion. It made Caleb’s heart pound in his chest. It made it almost easy to forget the humiliation at dinner. Such things seemed so small in the face of Nature. 

But Seymour it seemed, had not forgotten. “William is a ludicrous fellow, don’t you think?”

Caleb tensed. Even though Seymour was right he felt as though he should defend William, as one of his own, against upper-class disdain. “He didn’t have your advantages, _my Lord_ ,” he said.

Seymour glanced at him, eyebrow raised. “You’re angry. Don’t be. No one considers you to resemble him in any way, least of all myself. His making himself a joke does not reflect on you.”

“It reflects on all of us who ape our betters,” Caleb said, bitterly.

Seymour turned back to the storm. “He apes his betters. You do not. You are something entirely else.”

Emotion twisted in Caleb’s chest at that, so that he could hardly breathe, hardly move. He reached out a shaking hand and touched Seymour’s arm. Seymour looked at him. 

“ _Thank you_ ,” Caleb whispered. 

Seymour smiled. 

 

Caleb’s heart was in his throat as Seymour draw the curtains, closing them into the dark, and slipped down from the window seat. Caleb was about to stand, thinking that he should turn the lamps on, when a hand on his leg held him still.

“Sit there,” Seymour told him, from somewhere near the floor. “I’ve been intrigued by something and you had better just sit there while I try it.”

“I don’t understand,” Caleb admitted.

“Neither do I.”

Caleb almost swallowed his tongue with surprise when Seymour’s hands unbuttoned his trousers and pushed them open. He couldn’t see him but Seymour must have been kneeling on the floor, and now he was undoing Caleb’s trousers. Caleb began to shake, curling his fingers around the window seat, hoping, praying, almost fearing, that Seymour was about to do what Caleb thought he might. It had never happened before, although Caleb had performed the act for Seymour many times, and Caleb had never expected it. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d imagined Seymour would ever want to do. 

But it was happening. 

Caleb felt Seymour’s hands on his stiffening member, and they stroked him to full hardness, before curious lips touched his flesh.

“My god!” Caleb breathed, overwhelmed. “My _god_ …”

He waited for Seymour to change his mind, to be brought back to earth by the taste or some other unavoidable truth, but instead Seymour opened his mouth and sucked him in. Caleb lurched forward with a bitten off cry and then for many long minutes he lost himself. He was a man dissolved in pleasure, like salt in hot water, outside of thought and time, knowing only the heat and wetness and softness of his lover’s mouth on him. It was staggering to know that it was Seymour’s mouth he was taking, Seymour’s lips around him, Seymour’s hair in his hand.

The storm was a blessing because it drowned out the moans he couldn’t contain as he tumbled towards climax, regretful that it would be over, wanting to live in this sensation always.

He was quite sure that Seymour wouldn’t allow him to climax in his mouth but he had forgotten Seymour’s stubborn pride. Caleb had done it for him and so Seymour seemed determined now not to be less brave, because when Caleb tugged urgently on his hair in warning, Seymour didn’t pull away. 

Caleb cried out into the storm, arched upwards and filled Seymour’s mouth, stunned, happy, triumphant.

He was still panting when Seymour moved, touched his mouth to Caleb’s ear and whispered, “It isn’t Latin or French or a degree from Oxford that makes you my equal.”

And he kissed him, tasting of Caleb’s seed.


	11. Chapter 11

It was late and Caleb was kissing him, and touching him, sliding the shirt off his shoulders, trailing shaking fingers over warm, smooth skin, while Seymour’s hands unbuttoned his trousers, slipping in to wrap around Caleb’s aching cock. 

Caleb moaned. 

The fire crackled in the grate as they sank down onto the bed, still kissing, always kissing. Seymour tasted of cigarettes, a taste that Caleb was starting to find arousing purely because he connected it to his lover. He wondered what he himself tasted of. 

Seymour was naked now and lying back on the sheets, firelight stroking his skin. He smiled, knowingly. “How worshipful you look,” he said, only a little mockingly. 

Caleb quirked an eyebrow and bent his head. He licked a long, relentless, line up Seymour’s cock and then sucked hard, making Seymour groan in shocked delight. 

Caleb raised his head again and observed the panting wreck of hunger he had just created. “You were saying?”

Seymour laughed, accepting the rebuke, and tugged him in for another kiss. 

This was going to be their last night in this bed for some months. The Season had begun and it was time to close the house for the winter and go up to town. Only a few staff were required in the London house as it was much smaller, but Caleb went of course, in his capacity as valet, and Gael was going, due to the notorious unreliability of urban boot-boys. 

“We’ll have to be very careful in town,” Seymour murmured, as if reading Caleb’s mind as Caleb kissed his nipples and carded his fingers through the curls between Seymour’s legs. “It is a much more difficult house to maintain privacy in.”

Caleb gently parted Seymour’s thighs, running a finger downwards to stroke his hole. It felt hot and _soft_ and it made Caleb’s stomach burn as always to think that he had been inside his master here, pushing in, penetrating. And that he was about to do it again. Seymour’s hips were surging upwards in a way that showed that he wasn’t about to say no.

“We’re always careful,” Caleb said. 

Most of the time. 

He kissed Seymour so that Seymour’s gasp would be against his lips when he trust a finger deep. Heat curled and coiled. Caleb hoped that their conversation was over for the time being, as he wasn’t sure he could maintain it any longer. They hadn’t had a chance to lie together for nearly a week and Caleb was feeling rather desperate. 

He leaned back so that he could wet his fingers with oil, and then watch Seymour’s face. He loved to chart the reactions, the darkening of Seymour’s eyes, the rising flush on his face, as Caleb slowly prepared him. One finger, two fingers, _three_. Seymour started panting and pushing down. 

“Now?” Caleb asked, brushing damp golden hair away from Seymour’s forehead. 

“Now.”

Caleb lifted Seymour’s hips and entered him, carefully. They both groaned. Not for the first time Caleb wondered what it felt like for Seymour. 

But he knew how it felt for _him_. It felt hot and tight. It felt like what sin would be if it was _beautiful_. It felt like nothing else in the world mattered except the chasing of pleasure. 

Seymour’s fingernails were digging into Caleb’s shoulders. He hoped there would be marks on his shoulders tomorrow night, because sometimes when they couldn’t lie with one another Caleb liked to stand naked in front of the mirror in his bedroom and look at the marks of Seymour’s hands, and touch himself. 

He began to move, deep, shallow, deep, shallow, wallowing in heat and slick sensation, his nose full of the dizzying scent of Seymour’s sweat, his heart full of things he didn’t dare say. 

Wasn’t it strange, the way he could say the most physically intimate things to his master, but the words ‘I love you,’ still stayed locked in his chest. 

Maybe he was afraid Seymour wouldn’t want to hear it.

He pushed that thought away but perhaps it made him thrust harder, a little more roughly. Seymour wrapped his legs around him and arched, growling with approval, so Caleb did it again. Before long he was taking Seymour so hard that the bed was making noises and they stopped, afraid they would be overheard.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said, through gritted teeth. “I’ll slow down. I’ll be quieter.”

“No, damn you,” Seymour hissed. “Do it just like that.”

“But, ah _Lord_ , the bed was banging against the wall.”

“Fuck me on the floor, then!”

Caleb moaned in a ragged breath and pulled out. They scrambled off the bed and onto the rug beside it. They were both shaking, frantic, as Caleb tugged Seymour onto his hands and knees and slammed back into him. Seymour cried out into the hand Caleb pressed against his mouth. 

It had never been like this before. Caleb had never taken Seymour so hard, or from behind, nor had he ever slipped two of his fingers into Seymour’s mouth. He told himself that he was doing it to keep Seymour’s cries muffled, but truly it felt so delicious when Seymour started to suck his fingers.

Caleb only made himself drag his fingers free near the end, so that he could stroke Seymour to climax, so that he could feel Seymour tighten and lose control of himself, spilling his seed on the rug, as Caleb spilled his own deep inside Seymour’s body. 

 

Afterwards Caleb was shocked at himself, at them both, as they climbed wearily back into bed and Caleb pulled Seymour into his arms, and held him. 

He couldn’t resist trailing his hand down between Seymour’s legs to feel how wet Seymour’s hole was, to feel his own seed slippery on Seymour’s thighs. 

He feared this possessive feeling that he had for Seymour. Feared it because he had no right to it, would never be able to maintain it, not with their different stations. Maybe a man of Seymour’s own class might have been able to be possessive of him, but Caleb could only be grateful that Seymour allowed such intimacies and pray against the day that Seymour chose to stop them. There was no equality between them outside of this room, this bed. Where there was no equality there could be no claim.

So why did Caleb keep trying? He knew that every time he touched his master he tried to stake that impossible claim. 

“We rather lost sight of ourselves then,” Seymour observed.

Caleb closed his eyes. “Are you sorry that we did?”

“Not a jot.”

Caleb spluttered laughter and opened his eyes again. He looked down at Seymour who looked sardonic and tired, but utterly relaxed. 

Caleb kissed him. “I’m getting more…more…” He wasn’t sure of the word. 

Seymour nodded. “Yes, you are.” Then he reached up and placed his hands either side of Caleb’s head, stared into his eyes. “Dorian,” he said. “I think I see your true face.”


	12. Chapter 12

Caleb had never liked London. Or, perhaps, he liked it too much.

It was the energy, the movement, the noise and the barely restrained chaos of the largest city on earth. As soon as he set foot into the street his heart quickened, his stride sped up, and his ability to find that inner calm seemed to decrease. London made him want to _live_ , to live as a man lived, as his betters lived, for his own destiny. Not to be a smiling statue dedicated to the minor conveniences of his employer’s life. Not to be the servant standing motionless by the dining table, listening to the conversation of others, with no thoughts of his own, no desires of his own. 

This winter, as all others, he firmly resolved to be in control. _This_ time he wouldn’t let London unsettle him. It would be far too dangerous now, considering how careful he and Samuel must be, for Caleb to lose his equilibrium. He might end up doing something rash, such as re-enacting one of his recent dreams having his master over the dining room table. 

Caleb hesitated minutely outside the booksellers and grit his teeth together. He shouldn’t think about such things in broad daylight in the street! 

Really, he had become such a eroticist! 

He girt his loins and went to place the Autumn book order.

They had been in London for two weeks and in that time been inundated with visitors. In Seymour’s father’s day the Kellwick’s had been legendary for their hospitality (allowing for a variously-aged Seymour glaring in the background) and now, despite Lord Christopher’s death, people still hadn’t given up on Seymour undergoing some kind of transformation and becoming the gregarious giver of wonderful parties that his father had been. Every winter they descended upon the town house in Grosvenor Square and Seymour’s breeding was the only thing preventing him from physically throwing them out on their backsides. And even then it was a close thing. 

Caleb had long grown used to the awkward atmosphere as Seymour sat and grumped at people who had dropped in for tea or to unreasonably and provocatively invite him to things. 

Mr Lawrence often turned up too, shortly before the optimistic masses. He would settle himself in the morning room with a cup of tea and observe the glaring. 

Caleb had once ventured to ask him why he came.

“Because it’s funny.”

Which was fair enough. 

Caleb couldn’t help wondering how many years it would be before Society entirely gave up on Seymour. It all made one thing clear, which was that no matter how unsociable someone was, if they were a handsome, titled, lord with an estate and no wife, Society _would_ come, regardless of whether they were wanted. 

Today for example, Caleb was pouring tea and watching Lady Villiers humiliate her daughter. 

“Mama!” the blushing young woman finally hissed. “Lord Kellwick does not want to hear me play the piano. I don’t believe my accomplishments are of the smallest interest to him!”

Caleb resisted an urge to applaud. Miss Villiers was very observant. Most of the other young marriageable ladies who got trooped into the house for Seymour’s reluctant inspection completely failed to notice his lack of interest, mistaking it for inexperience with women or, as in one disastrous case the week before, poetic sensitivity. 

Caleb had had to usher that mother and daughter out before Seymour could tell them exactly what to do with their complete works of Byron. 

“Nonsense, Agnes!” Lady Villiers puffed, displaying the admirable determination of her class, much to her daughter’s mortification. “I know for a fact that Lord Kellwick is very fond of music.”

“Then he _truly_ won’t want to listen to me play,” Agnes muttered under her breath.

Caleb saw a smile hover on Seymour’s lips at that. 

 

Twenty minutes later the ladies were gone and it remained only for Seymour to tell Mr Lawrence to sling his hook as well. 

Gideon merely smiled around his cigarette and sauntered out. “Better than a play, Mr Hodgson,” he remarked, as he went. “Same time tomorrow?”

Caleb went back into the morning room with the day’s calling cards on a silver tray. He found Seymour scowling at the fireplace. 

He scowled even more when he saw the calling cards. 

“Why do they persist?” He demanded, as Caleb started to tidy up the tea things. “I give them no encouragement.”

“You give them active _dis_ couragement,” Caleb agreed. “But, if I may, your class is not one that gives up easily or is much prone to sensitivity.”

“Not true sensitivity, no,” Seymour snorted. “Just affected sentimental nonsense from novels. It’s Austen’s fault, you know.” He flung himself down into a chair and began smoking vehemently. “If it wasn’t for blasted Mr Darcy they’d all have abandoned me to my own devices years ago.”

Caleb grinned. “They think you’re a romantic hero just masquerading as a rude misanthrope.”

“Yes,” Seymour said.

“Whereas you actually _are_ a rude misanthrope,” Caleb added.

Seymour stared at him for a moment and then barked laughter. It made his beautiful eyes crinkle so that Caleb lost his head and before he knew it he was leaning down to kiss Seymour’s mouth. Seymour started in surprise, mid-laugh, but didn’t push him away as Caleb had expected him to. 

Instead Seymour tugged him down to sit in his lap so that they could kiss and kiss. Caleb tried to keep on ear on the unlocked door but his head was beginning to get misty with desire and pleasure. It had been two weeks since they had even kissed. There had been so many people in the house, so much to do, so many workmen in to check the flues and deal with all the problems houses had if they were shut up half the year, and the layout of the bedrooms was such that it was very difficult for Caleb to slip out of his own and into his master’s. 

So, now, they were quite desperate.

Caleb stroked his tongue against Seymour’s and swallowed Seymour’s moan. “I want you,” Caleb whispered, lips brushing lips, sliding his fingers into Seymour’s hair and pulling it gently. “I want to be inside you.”

Seymour’s hips jerked, his eyes closing. He took Caleb’s hand and guided it down between them.

“This is madness,” Seymour said. 

Caleb agreed. But he was still eagerly unbuttoning Seymour’s trousers, touching hot, hard, flesh, cradling it lovingly in his hand for a moment. “Look at me,” he said. “I want to see your face while I pleasure you.”

Seymour’s eyes opened and the heat and lust in them made Caleb shiver, made him want to do everything he could think of to this man, everything sinful that could ever bar them from heaven.

“You too,” Seymour demanded. 

Caleb bit back a groan and went up on his knees just enough to undo his own trousers, and then they had each other in hand and they were kissing and stroking and moaning into each other’s mouths so that the mistiness in Caleb’s head increased, until he forgot the unlocked door, forgot the unwashed teacups, and only knew the pleasure of Seymour’s fingers on his cock. The pleasure of the gasps Seymour made as Caleb abused his body. 

“ _Yes, yes, yes_ ,” Seymour panted, inspiring Caleb to stroke faster, his own hand tightening on Caleb, hips rolling as climax approached, hard and fast.

 _Relief_ …

 

Afterwards they tried to be appalled at the risk they had taken but failed rather. They merely cleaned themselves up, kissed one more time, and then Caleb went back to the teacups.

In a dream.

But the dream was shattered when a housemaid, Hannah, burst in, eyes frantic, to say, “Mr Hodgson, begging your pardon but there’s something, there’s something wrong with the bootboy! I think he’s a loony! You ‘ave to come!”

“What is it?” Seymour snapped, standing up.

The maid looked at him and coloured. She was new, having been hired in London for the Season, and hadn’t even met his Lordship yet. “I’m sorry, my lord! I didn’t do anything! I only asked him to clean the grate in the dining room!”

Horror settled into Caleb’s stomach and he felt Seymour tense beside him. They glanced at each other. 

The dining room fireplace.

 

Seymour and Caleb sent the maid downstairs and went, cautiously, into the dining room. It was dark with the curtains drawn, and very silent. 

“I told the new staff that Gael was never to be sent in here, for any reason!” Caleb hissed, angrily. “They can’t have listened to me.”

Or perhaps they had listened but didn’t much care about bootboys. 

Seymour stalked to the curtains and flung them wide. 

The light revealed Gael, in a tiny ball in the corner, as far as he could get from the fireplace, eyes wide, face white, shaking from head to foot.

Caleb knelt in front of the child, carefully not touching him. They all knew how Gael had used to be. By turns like the living dead, or like a dervish of rage. Both Caleb and Seymour bore the scars. 

“Gael,” he said, gently. “Can you hear me?”

“It’s dark,” Gael whispered, eyes sightless. 

“It isn’t. His lordship opened the curtains, see?”

“So dark. And he’s dead.”

Caleb closed his eyes. Gael was trapped in the dark, behind the walls, and Caleb didn’t know how to help him. The boy had been like this for months when it had happened. It was only time that had eased his trauma. Allowed him to react, speak, smile. Caleb didn’t know what to do. 

“We should be very quiet and very patient,” he said to Seymour. 

Seymour looked thoughtfully down at Gael, who had resumed staring at nothing as if no one else was there, terror glowing from him like a streetlamp. 

“No,” Seymour said. “I think not.” He leant down and said, loudly, in Gael’s face. “Gael! Where is my newspaper!”

Gael blinked, his eyes flickered. 

“Do you hear me, boy?” Seymour demanded, crossly. “Get onto your feet and get to it, damn you!” 

“Seymour!” Caleb gasped, horrified. 

But then Gael suddenly jumped up. “Yes, my lord! I’m sorry, my lord!” 

Seymour flung a pound note at the lad and said, “And I want some apples, some chocolate, and half a pound of cheese. Repeat it!”

“A newspaper, some apples, some chocolate and half a pound of cheese, sir!” Gael babbled, eyes wild.

“Right, off you go then!”

Gael shot out of the room like a whippet on black coffee, leaving Caleb open-mouthed. He turned to Seymour. Seymour glanced at him and then shrugged. 

“If I had spent nearly an hour trapped in a wall with the dead body of my friend, I wouldn’t want to talk about it and I wouldn’t want to be indoors. Out there,” Seymour motioned out at the street full of people and movement and life. “It’ll be hard to believe in being buried alive in the silence.”

A lump rose up in Caleb’s throat.

Seymour rolled his eyes. “Pull yourself together, man! And go to make some tea.”

On the way out Caleb deliberately didn’t look at the slightly mismatched wallpaper on the wall above the fireplace.

 

Down in the kitchens he gathered the new servants together and said,

“It seems that when I told you all not to send Gael into the dining room _for any reason_ you either didn’t listen or didn’t care. I am forced to tell you why he isn’t to be sent in there, but if a single one of you mentions it to him you will be dismissed at once.” Caleb ignored Hannah’s horrified expression and continued. “A few years ago we hired a man to clean the chimneys. He was, of course, expected to use brushes. Instead he used boys.”

A gasp of horror went around the room. Most of the older servants remembered the days when children were sent up chimneys but it had been illegal for a long time.

“He started in the dining room. We didn’t know what he had done until the screaming started.” Caleb swallowed. He could hear the screaming now. “One of the boys had become stuck. So another boy, Gael, had been sent in to get him. Except that the first boy, his friend, had already suffocated and Gael too became trapped. It was an _hour_ before the chimneysweep asked us for help. He let Gael stay in the dark with the body of his friend, expecting to die too, all that time, too terrified to scream until he began to realise that no one was coming to get him out, that the sweep was _hoping_ he’d die as well so that no one would know either body was there before the sweep had had the chance to abscond. Once Gael realised that he started screaming.”

Caleb glanced around the room at the ashen-faced servants. Hannah was crying. He didn’t feel particularly sorry for her. 

“Gael was eight.”

 

He didn’t tell them that it had been Seymour who had ignored the panic as everyone wondered how to get Gael out safely. He had yelled everyone into silence, picked up a sledge hammer, listened intently at the wall for a moment, and then stood back, grim faced, before swinging the hammer. Wallpaper, plaster, and brick had exploded out into the room in an orgy of coughing and dust until there was space for Seymour to reach in, grab a soot streaked arm, and yank Gael free. 

The boy had refused to let Seymour go for the rest of the day. 

“How did you know you wouldn’t hit him with the sledge hammer?” Caleb had asked. “How did you know exactly where in the wall he was?” 

Seymour looked him in the eye for the first time since they had buried his father the previous summer, “I heard his heart beating.”

 

That night Caleb checked on Gael in his room. The boy was sat under the window (Caleb always made sure that Gael had a room with a window) staring out at the lights of London. 

“Gael,” Caleb said. “I brought you the uneaten biscuits from dinner.”

“Thanks, Mr Hodgson.” Gael took the biscuits gratefully, but there wasn’t his usual exuberance in the way he ate them. 

Caleb sat down on the little bed. “Gael, are you…well?”

Gael looked down at his feet as if too ashamed to meet Caleb’s gaze. “I’m sorry I made a fuss, Mr Hodgson. I’m not a little kid. I shouldn’t still be scared of that…that room.”

“It’s a reasonable thing to be scared of,” Caleb told him. “I would be too, if I was you.”

Caleb didn’t like to imagine what that hour had been like, in the dark, wondering why the chimneysweep wasn’t helping him get out, wedged up against his dead friend, trying to breathe.

“No one will ever send you into the dining room again, Gael,” Caleb promised. Gael looked at him. “And if they do,” Caleb smiled, “You have my permission to tell them to sod off.”

Gael’s jaw dropped. “Mr Hodgson! I never heard you use a word like that before!” And he burst out laughing. 

Caleb took the opportunity to give the boy a hug. Gael had strong theories about not being ‘sissy’ so Caleb hadn’t hugged him before. Gael was blushing furiously when he was released but smiling. 

Caleb turned to go but was arrested at the door by Gael’s worried voice. “Mr Hodgson, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“When I went out for the newspaper and the other stuff a man stopped me and told me to give his Lordship a message, but I was too frightened to.”

Caleb’s pulse quickened. “What man?”

“I didn’t know ‘im. He said he’d be coming to see his Lordship soon.” Gael fiddled worriedly with his shirt neck. “Mr Hodgson?”

“Yes?”

“What’s a bailiff?”


	13. Chapter 13

Caleb waited until all the staff _should_ be in bed on the next floor before he dared venture towards Seymour’s room. His heart was thudding painfully, acutely aware that it would only take a sleepless maid losing her way on the backstairs and wandering onto the wrong landing for him to be discovered sneaking into his master’s bedchamber long after he could reasonably be expected to be performing his duties. 

The grandfather clock at the top of the main staircase chimed two o clock just as he had his hand on Seymour’s door, making him almost jump out of his skin. 

He suspected that should someone happen by his surely guilty expression must give him away if nothing else. 

He knocked softly and let himself in.

It was dark in Seymour’s room but an irritated voice reassured Caleb that Seymour was awake. After the previous occasion Caleb wouldn’t want to have to rouse a sleeping Seymour. He was afraid of what would happen. 

“What are you doing? It’s the middle of the damn night!”

Caleb made his way to the bed, remembering the layout of the room even though he couldn’t see it. A vague shadowy shape upon the mattress was all that he could see of his master. He supposed that they shouldn’t use the lamps because of the light that would be visible under the door. 

“There is something we have to talk about! Tomorrow might be too late!” Caleb hissed, crouching down beside the bed and patting about on the quilt until he found Seymour’s hand. He felt Seymour’s fingers tense but then relax, lying passive in his own. For the time being. 

Caleb thought that this might well be the first time that he had held Seymour’s hand. 

“Well?” Came a testy voice, then a brief glow illuminating Seymour’s face as he lit a cigarette. 

“Gael was accosted this afternoon by a man claiming to be a bailiff.”

Seymour sucked in a harsh breath but said nothing. 

Caleb continued. “He told Gael that he had business with you and so I thought it urgent enough that we couldn’t leave it until morning. I know a little about bailiffs. They like to call by very early.”

Seymour sighed, expelling smoky breath against Caleb’s face. It made him think of how Seymour tasted. Hot, raw, like something that was burning.

“Very well,” Seymour said at last. “Instruct the servants not to admit anyone without clearing it with you first, even if they claim to be a tradesman. A man of that sort will be unlikely to force his way into a house such as this. That will give me a few days to think.”

“Who sent him?”

“It could be any one of a half dozen of my creditors,” The cigarette’s glowing end bobbed up and down sharply as Seymour shrugged. “The most importunate is the wine merchant, chances are it’s him. Although, I hadn’t thought the man would have the nerve to call in bailiffs on _me_.”

“Perhaps he has a family to feed,” Caleb said, without thinking. 

He had known an up and coming seed merchant in his youth who had ended up in the workhouse because an aristocratic customer hadn’t paid him what was owed. It had rankled then, in Caleb’s ten year old mind, that when his class took something that didn’t belong to them they were called thieves and jailed, but when it was someone of _quality_ they were simply, ‘momentarily embarrassed for funds’. They seemed not to think about what it might mean to a tradesman with little capital to have even a relatively small debt run over month after month.

Seymour firmly drew his hand away. “I would pay him if I could. I’ve been prioritising the most serious debts and the wages of my staff and estate workers.”

Which included Caleb, of course. He blushed. 

There was a lengthy silence, at the end of which Caleb tentatively rose and sat down on the bed. He held out an arm and, after a moment’s hesitation, Seymour moved into it.

They lay down, Seymour’s head on Caleb’s chest, the only light coming from the dulling ember of Seymour’s almost finished cigarette. 

“Something must be done,” Seymour told him, flatly. “But I don’t know what.” 

“What about the bank?”

“I already tried to remortgage yet again but,” Seymour snorted. “It turns out that the bank only wants to lend money to those who don’t need it. Now that I need it they are very apologetic and very polite and very, ‘I’m terribly sorry, your lordship, if only it were possible,’ but no money is forthcoming. They would, I think, be equally apologetic and polite at a bankruptcy sale of all my belongings.”

Caleb’s blood ran cold. He hadn’t known that that could be a real sensation, running icy through his veins, rather than just an expression. “Surely it won’t come to that?” He whispered. 

“Not while I have breath in my body,” Seymour told him, voice vehement. 

Caleb admired Seymour then, intensely. He was still so young, only four years into his title and encumbered by a debt-ridden estate, not to mention the whispers about his legitimacy, and his ill-advised relationship with a servant, and yet he rarely flinched, he only set his jaw and strode into life as though it were a battle. 

Seymour leaned over Caleb to stub out his dead cigarette in the ashtray by the bed. Caleb couldn’t help himself. He kissed Seymour’s arm.

Seymour went very still.

So Caleb kissed his shoulder.

Then his neck.

Then his mouth.

And abruptly Caleb found himself being kissed back with such passion that his head spun, his mind shattered, and all he knew was soft hair in his hands, and Seymour’s warm mouth on his. All he knew was the thud of Seymour’s heartbeat as Seymour lay atop him. 

When Seymour’s mouth left his and ran down Caleb’s neck to bite and lick, Caleb arched with pleasure and breathed, “We shouldn’t, the walls are so thin, the,” But he never finished because Seymour ran a hand downwards, into Caleb’s trousers. 

When slim fingers closed about his flesh Caleb stopped thinking.

“Seymour…” he gasped, yearning into the touch.

“What does it feel like?” Seymour asked, voice low and intent. “When you bugger me, what does it feel like for you?”

“What?” Caleb had to bite his lip to marshal his mind enough to answer coherently. “Ugh…yes…touch me… It’s tight, hot. It’s…I can’t describe it.”

“I want to know. I want to know what it’s like.”

His intelligence had evaporated the moment Seymour started stroking him so it took him a long time to work out what Seymour was really saying. When he did his heart nearly stopped. 

Seymour wanted to have him. 

Here. Now. 

Maybe it was just for distraction, so that Seymour could stop worrying about money for a while, to help him pretend that here in the dark there was nothing to fear, but Caleb couldn’t quite care if that was the only reason. The truth was that he wanted Seymour inside him, even though it scared him a little as something too close, too dangerous, too like giving all of himself when he had sworn that he would hold _something_ back in case he got hurt, destroyed. In case Seymour woke up one morning and decided that lying with his butler was a degradation. 

“I’ve…never done that before,” Caleb found himself saying. 

Seymour’s face came close enough to his that even in the dark Caleb saw shining eyes. 

“ _Good_ ,” Seymour said. 

 

It hurt. It hurt a great deal, at first, which made Caleb worry that he had hurt Seymour in the past. 

But then he realised that it was his own fault. He was struggling to let go, to let Seymour take him, and so he was tense and tight like a drum in a way that Seymour never was. 

He was grateful to Seymour for neither commenting on this nor continuing to push, only waiting, a little inside, and kissing Caleb breathless. While Caleb fought his own body, his own mind. 

And eventually won. He breathed out and Seymour slid inside him all the way so that they both groaned softly. 

“Caleb…dear Lord…” Seymour gasped, forehead against Caleb’s own, mouth labouring to drag in air. 

Caleb’s entire flesh felt like it was melting, his bones dissolving, unable to stay in its usual form. Seymour was big and hard in him, spreading him wide open with a burn and a moan and an edge of panic.   
Panic because Caleb was helplessly in love and knew it. 

Seymour began to thrust gently, building a strange, beautiful, friction between them. Caleb had to bite into Seymour’s shoulder to keep from crying out. It felt like nothing he’d imagined. Like nothing he’d known. And it felt more of a relief than he’d have thought to just give himself up to it, to being had, to Seymour. 

Push, moan, slide, thrust…

Like falling into another world where magic was. 

Dangerous magic. 

Seymour’s shaking hand wrapped once again around Caleb’s dick and began to stroke, moving slickly from sweat and Caleb’s own excitement. Seymour took him harder, deeper, grunting with every movement in a way that sent odd shivers of pride right up Caleb’s spine. 

Caleb was distantly aware that the bed was creaking. 

He was distantly aware that the rest of the world existed. 

He cared about neither fact. 

He jerked suddenly and then he was climaxing from both within and without, trembling from head to foot and spitting over Seymour’s fingers.

Seymour’s breath stuttered and he rammed in one more time, making Caleb wince deliciously, before making a desperate noise into Caleb’s mouth. Caleb felt Seymour’s seed bloom in his belly. His dick twitched, trying to climax again despite all. 

“Seymour,” he heard himself sobbing. 

Seymour only kissed his nipple from his place collapsed on top of him, and didn’t speak for some time. 

 

“So,” Caleb said, as the first hint of dawn began to lighten the room. “Now you know what it is like.”

Seymour, lying beside him, grinned. 

Caleb didn’t think he’d ever seen Seymour smile quite like that before. 

“Yes,” Seymour replied. “My curiosity is satisfied.”

“Which way do you prefer?” Caleb risked asking. He was rather afraid that Seymour would always want to do it this way. Caleb had experienced exquisite pleasure with Seymour in him but he wanted both ways, wanted everything. To take _and_ be taken. 

And he didn’t want to be the cliche of the fucked servant. 

“It was good, but on the whole I think I prefer your dick in me, rather than the other way around,” Seymour said, lazily.

When he saw Caleb’s open mouth and stunned eyes, he grinned again, wolfishly, and kissed him, biting firmly at Caleb’s lower lip. “Nevertheless I’m going to fuck you like this, on occasion, when the mood strikes me, have no fear about that.”

Caleb laughed quietly, momentarily speechless. 

“Your candour grows,” he observed after a while.

Seymour shrugged. “Coyness is for women. I find nothing to be ashamed of in liking you fucking me. Or I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Caleb tugged Seymour down and kissed him for a long time. 

Right at this moment threatened bailiffs, looming financial disaster, the risk they were running even being in this bed together, the class chasm between them… it all seemed a million miles away.

Right at this moment life was perfect.


	14. Chapter 14

Caleb rather felt that he ought to be building battlements and then patrolling them, bow and arrow in hand, prepared to slaughter all comers. 

He had already opened the front door with a fearsome, unwelcoming smile to a hapless postman, two grocery deliveries, and the newspaper boy. He was quite determined to keep out the threatened bailiff, even if it meant slightly frightening unfortunate bystanders. 

Although he did give the newspaper boy a piece of plum cake when the child couldn’t stop trembling.

Gael was hardly any more temperate in his reaction, once he understood what the bailiff intended. Brown eyes had narrowed, canines had seemed oddly more visible suddenly and Caleb could have sworn that Gael’s unruly hair stood almost on end.

“If the bailiff comes can I hit him?” Gael demanded.

‘Yes,’ Caleb thought.

“No,” Caleb said. “That would be most inappropriate, and besides Gael he is rather bigger than you.” 

Gael grinned as if he knew something Caleb didn’t about relative size and violence. Considering the boy’s utter worship for Seymour and the fact that Gael had apparently decided that anyone who threatened his master’s happiness was evil incarnate, Caleb wasn’t actually entirely sure who would win in an altercation between an eleven year old boot boy and a six foot bailiff. 

Assuming of course that Caleb hadn’t got to the man first.

 

By mid-afternoon Caleb was a little bemused at the bailiff’s failure to arrive. His experience had always been that such men didn’t make empty threats. 

To keep himself busy he cleaned the kitchen, much to the rage and chagrin of Cook who saw this as an encroachment on her kingdom and an implied reproach at her standards. Caleb would have explained that the cleaning calmed him and she shouldn’t take it personally but he was feeling agitated and the only other possible refuge would be in reading. And he couldn’t do _that_ because he couldn’t sit down.

He blushed at the thought and applied himself with renewed energy to the brasses. 

He kept remembering the feel of Seymour’s stiff member inside him and it made him shiver with unnameable sensations. And he was fascinated at the thought that Seymour too had experienced that feeling, from him, and the knowledge of what Seymour felt when Caleb was taking him made Caleb feel closer to his lover, made him feel a more profound understanding of what lovemaking was. 

And then a thought burrowed to the front of his mind and he nearly bit his own tongue from the shock of it. 

_Was that how Kassandra used to feel when I was inside her_?

Caleb paused in his cleaning and closed his eyes against a surge of something a little like guilt and a lot like grief. 

Could he never be happy? Entirely happy? 

Why must the past always be there, threatening to suck him down again? 

In his heart he knew the answer to that question. If Kassandra had died in some ‘natural’ way, from illness or accident he would have grieved in agony just as acute but it would not have poisoned the rest of his life. The fact that she had taken her own life and that _he_ and his actions was the only possible explanation for her having done so meant that he could not escape that first flush of horror and pain. 

She hadn’t died because she threw herself in the river, not directly. He had murdered her, by being unable to control his love for her, his desire for her, and for not being strong enough to resist hers for him. So that they had transgressed the most fundamental of Heaven’s laws, eventually forcing her to despair. 

“Mr Hodgson?” Gael’s worried face, somehow tanned in the midst of a London winter, appeared between Caleb and the range that he was no longer cleaning. “You look right peaky, do you think you should sit down or something?”

Caleb swallowed his self-indulgent wallowing and forced a smile. What could be gained from rehashing the past? He couldn’t change a moment of it, and wasn’t even certain that he would want to if it meant not having had her love, however briefly. “I’m only rather tired, Gael.”

Gael looked doubtful but didn’t press the matter. “His lordship rang for you. He’s back from town.”

 

Caleb straightened his shirt in front of the hallway mirror before he went into Seymour’s study. He agreed with Gael about how pale he looked. It must be the lack of sleep and the months of surging, contradictory, emotion occasioned by his becoming his master’s lover. 

It was a complicated life, no denying it. 

Seymour was in his favourite armchair by the fire, glaring at it as if by so doing he could make it burn brighter. 

Caleb shut the door softly behind him. “Seymour…”

A thin hand reached out and clasped his, momentarily, before releasing it. They dared nothing else, having no doubt at how reckless their recent behaviour had been and how lucky they had been the day before that the maid had run into the drawing room when she had and not five minutes earlier. 

Seymour motioned to Caleb to sit but instead he went to stand by the fire, looking down at Seymour. 

The handsome face was set, grim. 

“There has been no sign of the bailiff all morning,” Caleb told him. 

“I paid the bill,” Seymour said. He chewed angrily at his lip. “I went to my aunt and humiliated myself by asking her for money and though she gave it she exacted payment with interest by bending my ear for an hour and half about my financial mismanagement, how unworthy I am to follow my father as Lord if I can’t even remain solvent, and so and so forth unto the end of time.”

Amidst the anger that Lady Smythe had dared to speak to his master like that Caleb took a moment to doubt that Seymour had asked very tactfully or humbly for the money, and to wonder if the vehemence of the resulting lecture was related to that. 

“She seems under the impression that I’ve frittered away what money the estate does earn in wild dissipations. She made dark references to ‘dancing girls’.” Seymour snorted, glanced at Caleb. “I wonder what she would make of my butler’s noticeable reluctance to sit down today.”

Caleb blushed. “Dancing girls are, perhaps, not your forte,” he agreed.

Seymour sighed and reached for a cigarette. “The money she gave me won’t last long and she cannot give more. Her estate is hardly less encumbered than my own. Her son is soon to marry an heiress and it will barely pay the mortgage.”

Caleb found that he was twisting his hands together, worried, and made himself stop. “Can you not sell some outlying farms or a little of the parkland?”

Seymour shook his head. “I tried that. The adjoining estates aren’t interested in taking on more land and they wouldn’t pay a reasonable price for it anyway. It’s amazing how ruthless people become when they know that the seller needs to sell. My father was always quite candid with his friends about the estate’s financial problems so it’s no secret that I’m in a parlous state.” Seymour shot Caleb a bitter look. “People are quite happy to take advantage of that. It’s sticks in my throat to let them cheat me, no matter how much I need the money. And I have a responsibility to my tenants not to sell their farms out from under them.”

Caleb hesitated and then blurted, “What of selling up entirely?”

Seymour paused in his smoking and put his cigarette down in an ashtray. 

“I mean, I understand your feelings about the tenants but it’s no better for them surely to be part of an estate on the verge of bankruptcy? Perhaps everyone would be better off if you sold the house, the   
parkland, everything. You could live very handsomely on the proceeds for the rest of your life.” Caleb knew he had made a mistake even before he finished speaking.

Seymour didn’t answer for some time, only stared at the fire with coldness coming off him in waves. 

Finally he spoke, through gritted teeth. “You make that suggestion with the best of intentions, I’m sure and can’t possibly know how insulting you are being. So allow me to explain.” Seymour looked at him, eyes flat and hard. Caleb flinched. “My father was descended from a thousand years of Kellwicks and we have held this estate for almost as long. There are tenants on the land who have known no other master for twenty generations. There is a Kellwick mentioned in the Doomsday Book, and one in Magna Carta. We held the county for King Charles during the Civil War and a Kellwick died at Waterloo.”

Caleb opened his mouth to start apologising (and perhaps to venture the heresy that family wasn’t entirely about place) but Seymour’s vehement expression stopped him. 

“Do you think I would be able to meet my eye in the mirror again if I knew that it was me, the bastard child of a Hackney prostitute and God only knows who (because no, the rumours are wrong, I am _not_ his son, not his blood) was the one who ended all that? I may only be adopted. I may be an impostor amongst the Kellwicks, but he always said that didn’t matter, that he had raised me to become a Kellwick, and I have no intention of paying him back by letting everything his ancestors achieved get sold off.”

Caleb’s mouth opened but no words came out. 

Like everyone else he had assumed that Seymour was illegitimate but Lord Christopher’s son nevertheless, or at the very least the son of some distant cousin. He had never dreamed that Seymour had no blood connection whatever and came from stock no better than Caleb’s own. 

“I am sorry,” Caleb managed at last, voice thick with emotion. “I meant only to free you from intolerable worry. You are carrying such a burden.”

Seymour’s face lost a little of its anger. “I can only respond to that with, ‘physician, heal thyself.’ We’ve all got burdens.”

“What do you mean?” Caleb demanded. 

Seymour shrugged and picked up his cigarette again. “Only that you have secrets. I’m no fool, I know there is something I don’t know. But it’s up to you whether you ever tell me. It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t.”

Caleb swallowed. Tell Seymour that he had lain with his own sister? No. No, that would not be happening this side of the grave.

They spoke no more after that and did their best to avoid each other for the rest of the day. Seymour was angry with him and wanted to be alone, and Caleb needed time to process what he had been told, in particular the unexpected revelation that Seymour was more insightful about the people around him than his disinterested, bored, manner suggested. Although…Caleb remembered that Seymour had understood better than Caleb the wisest way to get through to Gael the day before. So, perhaps Caleb shouldn’t be surprised that Seymour had worked out that Caleb was keeping secrets.

Perhaps a childhood aware that he was a cuckoo in the Kellwick lineage, come from the lowest rung of society to the highest by sheer luck and the kindness of his adoptive father, had made Seymour into a man who watched others intently, always assessing, looking for weaknesses, looking for deeper motivations, in case someone tried to take away everything that Seymour had. Not the money or the status, Caleb didn’t think that Seymour cared much for _them_ , but the name, the history, the gift his father had given him of belonging somewhere, of having been loved by someone. 

 

That night Caleb rather miserably decided that he wouldn’t be especially welcome in his master’s bed and so went to his own with a book. 

But he couldn’t get to the end of a sentence without worrying about something so was about to give up and turn out the light when there was a soft knock at the door. 

“Come in,” he said, assuming that it was Gael who sometimes dropped by when he couldn’t sleep. 

But Seymour came in.

Caleb scrambled out of bed and exclaimed, “Are you mad? This is the servant’s corridor! Someone could see you!”

Seymour turned the key in the lock, crossed his arms, and glared. “No one did. Stop flapping.”

Caleb hesitated for hardly an instant before crossed the floor and pulling Seymour into his arms, kissing him hungrily. Seymour kissed him back at once, tasting of smoke and enough whisky to explain his reckless venturing upstairs to his butler’s room.

Caleb slid his hands into Seymour’s shirt, stroking stiffening nipples and a sharp collarbone. “Thank you,” he whispered, against Seymour’s neck. “Thank you for telling me such a private thing about yourself.”

He knew the trust Seymour had shown him by revealing his true parentage. Caleb could destroy Seymour in Society by blabbing it. 

Seymour didn’t reply, merely let Caleb kiss him and strip him until he was stood naked against the door, (the bed was not a possibility, due to elderly, loud, springs), and Caleb was sinking to his knees.   
He took a moment to just bury his nose in the curls between Seymour’s legs, making Seymour gasp, and to smell him, drown in him, thinking that this must be how animals felt, to be compelled by scent as much as sight. The scent of a familiar, intensely desired, body, not entirely sure of the distinction between the urge to give pleasure and to _devour_.

Caleb licked a long line up Seymour’s cock, making Seymour shudder and bite his lip, before taking him as deep into his mouth as he could without choking. 

Seymour’s hands tangled in Caleb’s hair, tugging almost painfully. 

Caleb sucked, and slipped a hand back to stroke gently at Seymour’s entrance, making him writhe against the door of generations of respectable butlers who surely could never have conceived of such an act. 

Or known how wonderful it felt to slide spit-slicked fingers into Seymour’s body, softly teasing him while letting Seymour thrust into his mouth, hips shaking, breath caught and fought for, and the room full of stifled noises and hunger and dissolution. 

And Seymour spending in Caleb’s mouth with a bitten-off moan, knees giving way so that Caleb had to catch him as he fell.

They lay, twisted together like rope, on the threadbare rug. 

Eventually Seymour hissed, almost defiantly, “I won’t sell, I will _never_ sell. Whatever I have to do to save the estate intact, I will do.”

“I understand,” Caleb replied, running a hand down Seymour’s spine. “You’ll think of something. We’ll think of something.”

“Even if you don’t like it?” Seymour asked.

“Even then.”

Seymour moved until he was sat astride him, hand wrapped loosely around Caleb’s erect body. “So, you still desire me, even though I am the son of a pox-ridden whore?”

From anyone else that would have been a plea for reassurance, a sign of insecurity, but Seymour made it sound like a challenge, a call to arms. 

“Always,” Caleb told him. “I will always desire you.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Good,” Seymour nodded, rising up on his knees and beginning to sink down onto Caleb’s cock, making Caleb swallow a yelp of surprise and pleasure. “Because good butlers are hard to come by.”

Their laughter trailed away into moans.

 

It was only a few days later that Caleb realised that Seymour had been trying to warn him.


	15. Chapter 15

They had snatched a stolen moment between the breakfast things being cleared away and the first of the dreaded morning callers. 

Caleb stroked his fingers through Seymour’s hair, smiling at the slight swell of Seymour’s lower lip from their kissing, smiling a little harder at the glazed look in Seymour’s eyes. 

Seymour’s hands came around Caleb’s back and slid up to touch lightly at the base of Caleb’s neck. Caleb shivered at the brush of cool, dry, fingers against his skin. 

“Seymour,” he breathed, resting his forehead against Seymour’s own.

Seymour didn’t reply. He was unusually quiet today, even for his accustomed taciturn self, seeming content to stand in his dressing room kissing like sweethearts on the pier. Caleb liked this mood in his lover, silent and almost acquiescent. 

Normally ‘acquiescent’ wasn’t a word that Caleb would consider as having any place in Seymour unless Seymour had just eaten a dictionary. 

Caleb decided that it was just as well that he hadn’t time to take advantage of it.

“I should go,” Caleb said. “Your guests will be arriving.” Seymour had uncharacteristically organised a morning party with tea drinking and cake and so on. When he announced it, Caleb had briefly wondered if he was ill. 

Seymour nodded slowly, turned away and reached for his cigarettes. He seemed to be smoking even more than usual lately. 

“May I say that the guest list is rather strange?” Caleb observed, smiling, as he straightened his shirt. “Lady Smythe, Mr Lawrence, and various others that I don’t think you even want to see.”

Seymour, his back to him, said, “Caleb…I…” 

Then he stopped.

Caleb’s smile faded. Something was wrong, felt very wrong, suddenly. “Seymour?”

Nothing.

“Seymour, why won’t you look at me?”

Seymour turned and Caleb was taken aback by the flash of despair in his eyes, but it was gone as fast as it appeared so that Caleb wondered if he’d imagined it. 

“Nothing, I just feel a little unwell,” Seymour shrugged. 

“I don’t believe you,” Caleb told him, stepping forward and taking Seymour’s arm. “What’s wrong?”

Seymour chewed at his lip, brows gathered in a frown, “Just remember that you made a promise.”

Caleb opened his mouth to ask what in god’s name Seymour meant but Seymour was already out of the door, leaving Caleb standing in the middle of the carpet with a sick feeling in his chest. Only the sound of Seymour saying something to a footman in the hallway prevented Caleb from running after him and demanding an explanation.

He’d promised he would accept whatever Seymour chose to do to save the estate. He’d meant it. But he hadn’t thought…he hadn’t…

What was this morning party? 

Traditionally the upper classes announced engagements at day time events.

Caleb coughed on a sob and had to sit down when his knees buckled, head in hands and heart stuttering. 

He _had_ promised but Seymour wouldn’t ask that of him, surely? To see him live some sham marriage to some wealthy young woman? Caleb knew that Seymour wouldn’t be able to touch her, wouldn’t want to, and in his soul Caleb also knew that Seymour was _his_ , arrogant though that might seem. It simply _was_ , like fire or water. 

_If this is what he plans_ , Caleb thought, shaking from head to foot. ‘ _Can I stand it? I did promise… and he would still be mine.’_

 _‘He’s **mine**_.’

A piece of paper, a ceremony, wouldn’t change that. 

She might not even live with them. It had happened before in the aristocracy (more often than anyone suspected), marriages of convenience where for various reasons the man or the woman, or both, needed the camouflage of social convention. Many were even happy partnerships of two friends who provided a fig leaf for each spouse’s true lovers.   
Maria Villiers. 

Caleb’s hands clenched. 

Maria Villiers and her mother, Lady Villiers were included in this morning’s party. And Seymour despised Maria Villiers least of the young heiresses that had been paraded before him. 

And Seymour had dined with them twice in the last two weeks. 

Something crunched inside him and he abruptly felt that this room was too calm, too ordered, that it should be expressive of the chaos in the world so Caleb reached out blindly, took hold of the porcelain ashtray on the nearest table and threw it with all his strength at the dressing room mirror. Glass smashed and shattered, fell and sparked, reflecting the morning light coming through the window, reflecting Caleb’s face in broken, distorting, shards. Yes, that was better. He found himself standing over it, unsure how long he’d been there, time lost, marvelling at the beautiful mess.

“I promised,” he said to himself, ringing for the maids to tell them about the unfortunate accident that had occured, mind dull and heart thudding like a steam engine in his chest. “I promised and I will keep that promise because I love him and I know, I’m sure, that he loves me.”

It would just be a piece of paper. 

Not a real marriage.

Seymour would never lie with her.

 

When Mr Lawrence arrived he took an involuntary step backwards in the hallway when he caught sight of Caleb’s face. 

“Mr Hodgson, what on earth is wrong?”

“Nothing, Mr Lawrence,” Caleb said, speaking through a distracting wailing noise in the back of his head but aware that appearances must be maintained. 

“Damn it man, you look on the verge of…of…”

‘ _On the verge of telling everyone that Seymour is mine and I’ve had him, I’ve been inside his body and he belongs to me and he’s mine_?’

Caleb blinked. “I don’t know what you mean sir, please come this way.”

Lady Smythe was demanding to know why Seymour was throwing his first party. “Have you gone mad, boy?” She enquired, poking at Seymour’s leg with her parasol. Seymour shrugged, eyes distant. 

Caleb didn’t even try to catch his master’s eye. 

He knew he wouldn’t be able to.

The doorbell went again.

Lady Villiers and her daughter stood there. 

Caleb had to bite deeply into his tongue to prevent himself spewing filthy words of anger and resentment. Lady Villiers’ knowing smirk was as hot coals on his head. Only the fact that Maria herself looked miserable gave Caleb the self control necessary to force down the writhing vines of rage that had been trying to crawl out from under his skin ever since he realised Seymour’s plan. Had she looked even a little happy Caleb might have hurt her. Might have hurt a lot of people.

He escorted the ladies into the drawing room, his worst suspicions confirmed when Maria at once went to stand by Seymour’s side in front of the fire, although moving with every sign of reluctance. 

Caleb was right. He had guessed right.

Seymour was going to marry Maria Villiers. 

There was, Caleb thought, an extraordinary added pain in the fact that as butler his place was in this room, forced to hear this, waiting to refresh teacups or hand around sandwiches, while inside his world was tipping, aching, howling. 

It was the fate of all servants at some time, to be in unendurable pain and have to hide it, but perhaps it had never happened to any servant quite in this way or for these reasons. 

“I’ve an announcement,” Seymour began bluntly, with no preamble. There was a sound of porcelain clinking as people put down their drinks. Out of the corner of his eye Caleb could see Mr Lawrence frowning, leaning against the wallpaper. 

It happened slowly, as if in a bad dream.

“Maria and I are to be married.”

In the moment of surprise and silence that greeted this Caleb closed his eyes.

When he opened them Seymour was looking at him, his young face tired and drawn, his lip no longer swollen from their kisses. 

“I’m sorry,” Seymour said, before turning his gaze away from Caleb, “For the suddenness of this announcement. Things have moved quickly.”

The guests seemed to unfreeze then and there proceeded a flurry of congratulations and hand shaking, Lady Villiers’ smug voice apparently everywhere at once, Lady Smythe cooing like a happy fat pigeon, and Seymour responding with distant discourtesy. 

Caleb poured tea.

Caleb listened to talk of weddings. ‘It’s not going to be a real wedding,’ he wanted to scream, scream into people’s faces with his hands around their throats. ‘It’s going to be a charade. Stop talking about   
it like it means something because it doesn’t.’

He helped people to sandwiches.

‘Tell them,’ he thought, wildly, against all hope. ‘Seymour, tell them this is a ghastly mistake but that you’ve no choice and it’s just for the money because I’m the one you love, me.’

He smiled and nodded when Lady Smythe’s nephew observed that Maria Villiers was very pretty.

If Caleb had really thought Maria pretty in a way that could catch Seymour’s attention he wouldn’t be standing here uselessly and there would be blood on the chandelier by now. 

He heard his own thoughts then and blinked. 

After Kassandra’s death he’d been plagued with violent fantasies. 

It seemed that they had returned. 

Self control. Yes, self control, that was the thing. That was what he needed to find and later he and Seymour would talk and make love and Seymour would tell him that it was only a sham, not real, not love, that what _they_ had was real. Seymour would tell him that none of it mattered. She would be like a sister.

Not like a sister of Caleb’s if course, like a normal sister. Sexless. Just…there. About the house. 

Like a pot plant. 

 

Moments or hours had passed in some degree but Caleb was beyond that for the time being. He moved in a fog, conducting the Villier’s women upstairs to the larger bathroom because Maria had spilt tea on her dress. 

He stood on the other side of the closed bathroom door, staring sightlessly at a painting on the opposite wall, and listened to their conversation.

“Can’t you at least try to look happy, you stupid girl!” Lady Villiers was saying. “Don’t you understand how lucky you are?”

Caleb thought that Lady Villiers couldn’t be aware of how thin the door was or how her voice was carrying. 

“I know, mama. I just…I…”

“You’ve shamed us all letting him do such things to you before the wedding and now you’re just fortunate that he is prepared to marry you. Do you understand that if he’d chosen not to we’d have had no way to make him do it? What could we have done to force him? Told people that you’d got with child by Seymour Kellwick and he wouldn’t marry you? We’d all have been finished!”

“Mama, please stop.”

“Thank god he has enough honour to do the right thing by you. Not every man would have.”

Caleb stared at the picture for a few more minutes as the words and their meaning sank into his mind. 

It was quite a good picture. A woman was drawing water from a well. It looked like a biblical scene. Caleb rather liked the artistry of the folds of her dress.

Seymour had lain with Maria and she was now with child. 

Seymour had lain with Maria and didn’t love Caleb at all. He couldn’t possibly. 

Because he had lain with Maria.

Caleb felt utterly calm as he walked away from the bathroom door and took the staircase to the servants quarters.

He felt utterly calm as he packed his belongings into a small suitcase.

He felt utterly calm, broken-calm, worthless-calm, empty-calm, as he went down the backstairs towards the kitchen. 

He found Gael alone in the kitchen stealing biscuits. The boy snatched his hand guiltily back from the jar. 

“Goodbye, Gael,” Caleb said, heading for the door. 

Gael stared at him, confusion in the big brown eyes. “Mr Hodgson, where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Caleb told him. “Seymour is getting married.”

Gael’s eyes went wide. “But I thought…I thought you and ‘im…were…”

“I thought that too, Gael.” Caleb had his hand on the door latch. It was wonderful how calm he was! “However Seymour cares for someone else and I think I’ve no choice but to leave or I might kill everyone   
in the house. Ha ha.”

“Wait! No, Mr Hodgson, you can’t leave ‘im! He needs you!” Gael grabbed hold of Caleb’s hand and tugged, trying to pull him away from the door.

“What on earth makes you think that?” Caleb asked, gently but firmly extricating himself from the boy’s grip. 

“I dunno, just a feelin’ from how he looks at you and that,” Gael blushed. 

“It was all a lie, Gael,” Caleb told him. “Grown-ups do that sometimes, with their lovers. You’ll learn. Like my sister Kassandra. She said she was happy but she wasn’t because she threw herself in the river.”

Bewilderment crossed Gael’s face. “Threw herself in the river? Kassandra? The kind lady with the dark hair?”

“Yes, I believe you met her but you were unable to speak at the time. She lied to me. She said she loved me and didn’t care what society would say, but she left me too. And now I had better leave him. Before I hurt him.” Caleb felt he had explained sufficiently. It was all very clear after all.

Gael stared, open-mouthed, as Caleb opened the door, walked through it. 

And closed it again.


	16. Chapter 16

Caleb had found what he thought was the one place no one would look for a supposedly respectable butler. It was a bench in Hyde Park well after sunset when, frankly, there was only one sort of person around. The sort of person either looking for, or selling, or buying sex. The sort of person who was also most decidedly male. 

Not that Caleb had come here with that intention. He had merely tired of wandering around London, thinking nothing in particular, feeling nothing in particular, and had run out of money several days ago, so that sitting on a bench in a public park seemed his only option. It could have been worse, he thought, he was more comfortable here than he’d been in the orphanage. At least here no one teased or mocked or bullied him. Because no one here cared. 

And _he_ didn’t care. He was quite proud of that. When he’d left the house a week ago he’d expected to get angrier and angrier as shock wore off but either the shock was more profound than he’d realised or he simply couldn’t feel any worse, because he was still numb and relatively calm. He’d spent some time in libraries reading the newspapers (carefully avoiding the announcements section and the help wanted section not wanting to see Seymour’s engagement or the advertisement for his own replacement) and he’d stayed in very cheap hotels until the money ran out. He’d even managed to eat. 

A little. 

He ruminated as he watched a pigeon pecking at the gravel path.

Was this his future? He could just stay here in this park. There were men who lived here all year round. He supposed that he should at least _try_ to get another position (he didn’t think Seymour would deny him a reference) but the thought of it, of trying to be normal, pretending to be hopeful and cheerful…

Somewhere in the trees behind him someone laughed. It was a low, soft, laugh of pleasure.

And Caleb was suddenly doubled over on the bench, gasping for breath, wracked with pain and heartbreak and confusion. 

_I thought he loved me_.

“Are you alright, lad?” 

Caleb shook his head, scrubbing his face against his knees. “No.”

A hand alighted on his head, patting gently. 

A sort of shame at his loss of control tried to niggle at him but couldn’t find room for attention amongst all the other terrible feelings.

The hand on his head slipped down to the back of his neck.

He started up, yanking himself out of the stranger’s grasp. A middle aged man held up both hands in placation and said,

“Don’t mind me, just you’re a handsome young man and well…”

Caleb regarded the stranger with suspicious eyes for awhile but decided that he was safe. The stranger was fifty if he was a day and built softly. There would be no forced molestation from him. 

And Caleb _was_ sat alone in the most notorious pick-up park for buggers in London. It would be understandable if people thought he was looking for someone. 

His stomach rumbled, suddenly and loudly. 

The stranger, who hadn’t moved, ventured, “Are you hungry?”

Caleb was very hungry actually.

When he didn’t answer the man added, “I could pay you…”

Caleb opened his mouth to tell the stranger exactly where he could stick his transparent offer but was arrested by the thought, ‘Well, if Seymour’s prepared to sell himself why shouldn’t I?’

He never knew afterwards if he would have done it, let the man have him, prostituted himself.

Because Gideon Lawrence saved him. 

 

The middle aged man had been sent off with a flea in his ear by an enraged red-head and Caleb was currently being bundled out of the park and in the direction of a nearby restaurant. Within minutes he was deposited in a private dining room and was being glared at by Gideon and watched sympathetically by a young woman who seemed familiar but Caleb couldn’t quite place her. She’d been with Gideon when Gideon saw Caleb on the bench and come storming over shouting and she’d seemed entirely unsurprised to be a party to breaking up a tentative act of prostitution. 

Most women would have fainted by now.

“What’s happening?” Caleb asked, starting to realise that he was faint and confused from lack of food. He was pretty sure he’d lost time between the park and the restaurant. That was happening to him more and more lately, as if his mind couldn’t bear too much reality and kept skipping parts of it. 

“I’m ordering dinner and you’re eating it and then you’re explaining your damn self!” Gideon said, chewing at his cigarette.

“Gideon…” the lady admonished. 

Gideon blushed. “I’m sorry, Patience.”

Patience turned to Caleb and smiled. “I’m Patience Lowell. We’ve never met but Gideon tells me you attended one of my lectures in Bristol.”

Of course…the Methodistical young lady who was the object of Gideon’s probably hopeless passion. 

When Caleb didn’t answer (he didn’t know what to say) she added, “I sometimes minister to the unfortunates in the park if I’m in London. Gideon has been helping. When Gideon said that he recognised you, that you’re a butler, a respectable man,”

“I’m not a respectable man,” Caleb interrupted. 

“Well, perhaps I don’t mean respectable in the way other people might. Certainly Gideon himself couldn’t be considered respectable but,” She smiled ruefully. “He’s starting to convince me that these things are more complicated than I’d previously thought.”

The food arrived and there was no more talking until Caleb had eaten it. He was grateful that Patience and Gideon kept up a quiet conversation between themselves about nothings so that he could eat without feeling self-conscious. When he’d finished Patience put her hat and gloves on and said, “I’ll leave you to talk to Gideon, I don’t want to impose. I hope you won’t be offended if I leave you this?” She gave Caleb a card with an address on it. “This is a hostel for young men. One of my friends from the church is the proprietor. It might be more comfortable than the park.”

Caleb swallowed. He wanted to thank her, sincerely, but the words got trapped in his throat and he could only nod. 

Gideon’s eyes were on her until the door closed behind her. The love in Gideon’s eyes made Caleb hurt. 

He was rather afraid his dinner was about to come back up.

“You look a little green, Mr Hodgson,” Gideon observed. “You ate too quickly.”

“Thank you for the meal, Mr Lawrence but I really should be going.”

Gideon snorted. “Don’t even try that nonsense on me. You’re going to sit here and tell me why you’ve walked out on your position, your responsibilities, on poor Gael, a boy who I’ve seen looks up to you, and on our high-and-mighty Lord Kellwick, who has been _insufferable_ since you left.”

Caleb couldn’t stop his eyes moving to Gideon’s. “He’s angry?”

“He’s always angry,” Gideon shrugged. “This is like what anger was before the earth was made. I keep expecting to hear he’s finally lost his head completely and shot someone. Gael himself has taken all the household guns and hidden them somewhere. He won’t say where.”

Caleb, face hot, looked down at the sticky table top. Seymour was angry, or at least whatever Seymour was feeling was _coming out_ as anger. Most of Seymour’s emotions came out that way. 

“Hodgson, I have to ask and I hope you won’t take offence but…well…”Gideon sounded embarrassed but ploughed on nevertheless. “You walked out the day, the virtual minute, that Seymour announced his engagement…”

Caleb moved to leave, to run, but Gideon’s hand came down tightly but not unkindly on Caleb’s arm. 

“It’s alright, I’m not going to blab it around. I’ve my own secrets. But don’t take me for a fool.”

Caleb risked a glance at Gideon’s face which he found blushing but apparently truthful. He didn’t think Gideon would report what he’d worked out to the police, so what was the point in denying it?

“I overheard some goings-on in Seymour’s room last summer when he had that god-awful weekend party.” Gideon released Caleb’s arm and sipped at his brandy. “I thought it was one of the young ladies at the time, but it was you, wasn’t it.”

Caleb sighed and leaned his head in his hands, elbows on the table top. “Yes.”

“So you’ve run away because you’re jealous?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re a damned fool then!”

“You don’t understand,” Caleb began, straightening, forcing himself to meet Gideon’s eye again. “It’s not just the marriage.”

“He’s only doing it for the money, everyone knows that! I don’t think Maria is any keener than he is. What on earth have you got to be jealous about?” Gideon demanded.

“She’s with child!” Caleb blurted, and then caught his breath in horror. That wasn’t his secret to tell! He had no right. Shame washed over him.

“Yes, I know,” Gideon replied. 

Caleb’s mouth opened. “You…you know?”

Gideon poured another brandy and handed it to him. “Here, the food has probably settled in by now. I think you can safely have a drink and you look like you need it.”

Caleb took a drink, felt the brandy slide warmly down his throat. His head was spinning. 

Gideon sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “Maria and I are cousins, several times removed, and what’s more we’ve been friends for years. She’s always been…non-conformist. I remember when we were children being dragged about museums by nurses and tutors she would always disappear, cause huge worry, and come back having had some wonderful adventure. She was never quite like other girls despite how she behaves when her mother is around to see her. She always said to me that she had no intention of ever marrying so when Seymour announced the engagement I cornered her the next morning when her mother had gone out to order the wedding clothes and demanded an explanation.” Gideon inhaled deeply on his cigarette and then blew the smoke upwards where it curled about the ceiling light. “She said she didn’t have a choice because she’d had one adventure too many and got herself in trouble. Some handsome young guardsman, apparently, with no morals.”

Caleb’s hand was shaking so violently that he had to put his drink down on the table. Hope, painful, agonising, hope was trembling on every inch of his skin. “The child…the child isn’t his? Isn’t Seymour’s?”

Gideon shook his head. “Perhaps if you hadn’t run away so fast he would have had a chance to tell you that.”

“He had many chances to tell me. He didn’t,” Caleb mumbled.

Gideon’s laugh was incredulous. “You have met Seymour? Human communication isn’t really his forte. He’d have got round to explaining eventually, but I’m not saying it would have been soon.”

Caleb didn’t speak for some time. He was trying to order the information in his mind. The child wasn’t Seymour’s child. He hadn’t lain with Maria, far from it. Neither of them wanted to marry the other.   
Neither of them had a choice. Maria had to save her reputation. Seymour had to save the estate, or thought that he did.

And yet…

“They might grow to love each other…” he said finally, anxiously. Jealousy still writhed within him. He couldn’t switch it on and off at will.

“That’s a risk you might have to run, if you want to be with him,” Gideon observed. “God only knows why you do, incidentally. If I was a bugger, Seymour would be the last man on earth I would want for my sweetheart. You must be some kind of saint to put up with him. I thought that even when I only thought you were his butler!”

Caleb couldn’t help the smile on his face at that. “Sometimes you fall in love and that’s that, Mr Lawrence.”

“Call me Gideon, I think after this conversation first name terms are warranted,” Gideon pointed out wryly. 

Caleb blushed again.

 

It was some hours later and they were still talking, still drinking. Their conversation had ranged a long way but was now back to Caleb and what he was to do.

“Would I even be welcome if I went back?” Caleb wondered.

“Hard to say,” Gideon conceded. “Seymour hasn’t lifted a finger to replace you, he’s simply let the household go to hell in a hand basket. If it wasn’t for Gael, oddly enough, I think there would be chaos. He’s been going about the place telling people what to do. And they’re actually doing it!” Gideon laughed. “It’s as if he’s designated himself as your eleven year old representative.”

Caleb felt proud of that. Gael must have been watching him at work for years. And the boy had always said he wanted to be a butler one day. 

Caleb was briefly glad to hear that Seymour hadn’t made any moves to replace him but he hadn’t looked for him either, had he. “Seymour made no attempt to find me,” he said. “Maybe he would prefer that I stay away. Maybe he’s realising the madness of an affair with his servant. Maybe,”

“Maybe you’ll go back and he won’t want you. Maybe the marriage with Maria will turn into a real marriage over the years. Maybe it won’t and he loves you dearly. Maybe one of you will get hit by a omnibus.” Gideon slapped an impatient hand down onto the table, making empty glasses rattle. “And maybe this is life and you must live it!”

Which was how, for the second time in one evening, Gideon saved him.


	17. Chapter 17

Even though it was so cold that Celeb’s teeth were chattering and his feet burnt with it, he still couldn’t seem to make himself go in. He stood on the opposite pavement, huddled in his greatcoat, and stared at the house, paralysed by doubt. Would he be welcomed? Would he be told to sling his hook? Would Seymour ever be able to forgive him? 

One thing that had preyed most heavily on Caleb’s mind in the two days since Mr Lawrence told him the truth was that Caleb had broken his word. He had said he would accept whatever means Seymour chose to save the estate, even if he didn’t like it, and it was hardly as though a marriage of convenience hadn’t already occurred to him months ago as a route Seymour may take one day, and yet when it happened… When it happened Caleb hadn’t even paused to hear Seymour’s explanation of Maria’s condition. Caleb’s jealousy had writhed its way around his heart, made him assume the worst, and he had reacted accordingly. 

He had left Seymour.

Abandoned him.

And now he wasn’t sure what would be more terrible. If, by walking away, he had hurt Seymour so much that Seymour would no longer care for him. Or if Seymour had been temporarily put out at losing a lover, only to shrug after a few days and decide it was for the best, rationalising that he should never have been lying with his servant anyway. 

These were the fears that had been rippling through his skin like weeds for the past two days. That Seymour despised him now for his loss of faith. Or that Seymour no longer cared all that much after all.   
Besides, Seymour must be busy preparing for the wedding. Caleb had seen in the papers that it was due to take place in less than a fortnight. No doubt society would whisper about the haste of it but would most likely think the speed was due to Seymour’s parlous financial state. They would not think that Maria might have good reason to want the ceremony as soon as possible. Because in less than nine months a baby would be born and even the upper classes could count. There was only so many weeks premature that people would believe. 

Caleb forced down the ever-present surge of resentment that lingered despite all. Maria would stand beside Seymour in church and receive the blessing of God, their relationship acknowledged and approved. 

Caleb and Seymour would never have that. 

Caleb chewed a nail, conscious that his thoughts were drifting, circular, around his mind, always coming back to the same obsessions. 

None of which was helping him to cross the road and go back to his job.

Assuming he still had a job. 

Seymour hadn’t advertised for another butler, but that didn’t mean that he wanted Caleb within a thousand miles of him or his house.

“Mr Hodgson?”

Caleb started and fought a strange urge to run. 

Gael was staring at him, eyes wide and a little angry. 

“Gael…” Caleb said, crossing his arms to hide that his hands were shaking from both cold and anxiety. 

Gael shifted a large paper bag in his arms. A packet of Seymour’s cigarettes was poking out of the top. Caleb swallowed. Seymour didn’t trust anyone else to buy his cigarettes. Caleb had made the weekly journey to the expensive and exclusive tobacconists for years. Knowing that this week _Gael_ had done it made Caleb unreasonably angry, made him want to snatch the bag out of Gael’s arms. 

Gael sighed deeply. “You’ve been a right fool, ain’t you, Mr Hodgson.”

Caleb opened his mouth.

And then shut it again.

“Well?” Gael added, turning. “Are you coming in out of the cold, or what?”

 

In the kitchen Cook greeted him warmly and confused Caleb utterly by saying, “How is your poor grandmother, Mr Hodgson? Gael told us all about it. So very sad, to finally find your family and then get that sudden telegram telling you she was on her deathbed. I cried my eyes out when I heard, I did.”

“She croaked,” Gael said, before Caleb could speak. “So now he’s back.”

Once Cook would have scolded Gael for such insensitive language but she only shook her head at Gael and then patted Caleb on the shoulder sympathetically. “Well, you don’t need to worry about anything, Mr Hodgson. It was all a bit of a muddle that first day, you being called off so sudden like, but Gael’s been holding the fort, bless him!”

Caleb glanced, bemused, at Gael who blushed and shuffled his feet. “I didn’t do nothing…”

“Nonsense,” Cook beamed. “He quite come into his own!”

Gael coughed and scuttled out with Seymour’s cigarettes. 

“That boy will go far!” Cook said, handing Caleb a cup of tea. “You mark my words.”

 

Caleb was less than half way through his tea when Gael appeared back in the kitchen. “His lordship wants to see you, Mr Hodgson. Right now.”

The cup made a nervous clink on the saucer when Caleb put his drink down. 

He stood, smoothed down his jacket, checked he was tidy in the mirror by the door (he looked pale he thought, hunted) and went to meet his doom.

 

Evening was drawing in and Seymour hadn’t lit the lamps. He was sprawled in a his preferred armchair by the fire, smoking. 

And not meeting Caleb’s eye.

“So, you’ve crept back then,” Seymour observed.

Caleb bit his lip. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Seymour this angry. Somehow this quiet was more enraged than Seymour’s usual more vocal fury. Caleb could see how white Seymour’s knuckles looked where he clutched his cigarette. 

“Yes,” Caleb said.

“Worked it out, did you?”

“Yes.” 

Caleb knew it would be most unwise to tell Seymour that no, he hadn’t worked it out, Gideon Lawrence had explained it to him. If Seymour ever found out that Gideon knew so much about his private life they would all be dead within a week. 

Seymour didn’t speak for awhile but he didn’t dismiss Caleb either. So Caleb stood there, on the hearthrug. A little patience seemed the least he owed Seymour now. 

“Your promises don’t mean much, do they,” Seymour said at last. 

Caleb hissed as though struck, pain blossoming in his chest. “You could have told me, before, that she was with child. You could have explained, so I needn’t have discovered it the way I did. I heard her talking to her mother.”

Seymour looked at him then for the first time, eyes evidently surprised. “The baby? That’s why you left?”

“You thought I went because of the marriage? No, I was already trying to make my peace with that. But when I found out that she was pregnant, I thought…”

Seymour barked humourless laughter. “You thought it was _mine_? You must have failed to notice the last six months where I let you sodomise me on a near nightly basis, you idiot.”

Caleb felt himself redden. “There are men who lie with both genders.”

Seymour shrugged, stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, I’m not one of them. Besides,” Seymour stood and moved so fast that Caleb was thrown back painfully against the wall before he could breathe. “I would have thought you might have trusted me not to fuck someone else when I was already fucking you.”

“I…I don’t think I expected fidelity from someone like you,” Caleb blurted.

Rage passed over Seymour’s face. His hands on Caleb’s shoulders tightened. “What do you mean ‘someone like me’? You think because my mother was a whore, I must be one too?”

“Good God, no!” Caleb exclaimed, horrified. “Don’t even think that! I meant that you are Lord Seymour of Kellwick, and I’m your butler! I believed you might have lain with her because I know I’m not your equal, could never be your equal.”

“Rank stupidity,” Seymour hissed. “The only difference between the two of us is that I was adopted out of my class and you weren’t.” And he kissed Caleb hard, angrily, until Caleb’s lips were bruised and bleeding. Caleb growled in the back of his throat and dug his fingers into Seymour’s hair, kissing back with all his might, relief singing in his heart.

When they broke apart for breath Caleb said, “I’m sorry. I’ll be strong. I will try not to resent your marriage. I won’t fight the wedding. I’ll accept it.”

Seymour rubbed his thumb over Caleb’s lip. It came away red. 

And then Seymour licked Caleb’s blood from his thumb, with a grimace at the taste but not stopping until it was gone. Caleb’s pulse was thudding so hard that he couldn’t speak. He could only watch.

“This, now,” Seymour said afterwards, intently. “Is the only wedding I’m interested in.”


	18. Chapter 18

Caleb felt as though he hadn’t exhaled in days. 

In the minutes and hours after their fraught reunion a terrible awkwardness had descended. Certainly they had reconciled, and they had kissed, but nothing felt settled, not really. Yes, Caleb took enormous comfort in the words Seymour had spoken, about the true wedding, _their_ wedding, and in the memory of Seymour licking Caleb’s blood from his thumb. It made Caleb shiver from his gut right to his tarnished soul when he remembered that moment. It had been deeply erotic, almost something from pre-Christian religion, made of blood and commitment and brutal desire. 

And yet…a tension persisted between them, a hesitation that neither articulated. Both seemed to be frozen in time. They had not lain together since Caleb’s return, and Caleb thought that might not to be entirely due to the busyness and chaos in the house as they all prepared for Seymour’s marriage. True, Caleb had so much to do, between organising the wedding itself and readying the long unused rooms meant for the lady of the house at all Seymour’s properties (necessitating writing dozens of letters, and dashing on and off trains to the country estate, the Scotland hunting lodge, and then back to the London house), that he invariably fell into his bed half asleep before his head even touched the pillow. 

But he knew that wasn’t the real reason for their physical estrangement. 

He was afraid. He was afraid to lie with Seymour, afraid that it would be different, spoilt, because of how changed their situation was. He was afraid that there would be a sadness in it, now that Seymour had sacrificed himself for the sake of the family name, now that Seymour had made an outward commitment to someone else. Caleb tried, he tried with all his might, to keep his vow to not resent Maria’s coming, but the niggling jealousy and doubt remained. No matter what Seymour said, or did, Caleb feared betrayal, feared the slow creep of domestic propinquity. 

Perhaps it would take years but how could Caleb be sure that Seymour would continue as _his_? Maria seemed an intelligent, eccentric, young woman who (from what Caleb saw of her during the wedding preparations) understood Seymour well enough not to expect affection from him. Caleb liked her. He didn’t want to like her. He wanted to hate her. 

And if _he_ was able to like her, despite his seething envy, why shouldn’t Seymour come to like her in time, too? 

“Mr Hodgson?”

He believed Seymour to have been truthful when he said that he could not lie with a woman. Caleb understood that some men were simply incapable of being aroused by a woman. It wasn’t that Caleb dreaded Seymour bedding Maria.

“Mr Hodgson, I reckon the silver is clean now…”

What Caleb dreaded was Maria gradually stealing away even the tiniest iota of the heart which Caleb regarded as his. 

“Mr Hodgson!” 

A small hand came down on Caleb’s fingers in a sharp slap and Caleb jumped half out of his skin, not realising until then that he had been polishing the same silver cream jug for god only knew how long, while Gael increasingly desperately tried to get his attention, and had now resorted to smacking Caleb’s hand. 

A blush warmed on Caleb’s face. He set down his rags next to the tin of polish, and rather shamefacedly met Gael’s worried brown eyes. 

“I’m sorry, I was miles away,” Caleb mumbled. 

Gael snorted. “There ain’t even no map for wherever you was, Mr Hodgson!”

Caleb opened his mouth to automatically correct Gael’s grammar but Gael gave him a, ‘don’t even try it,’ look so Caleb thought better of it. 

He sighed and began to put the silver service back on the pantry shelves, ready for the wedding breakfast. The wedding was in two days. Everything that he could do in advance he had done. There wasn’t much that Caleb was responsible for now until the day itself arrived. 

“I came to tell yer that Cook has got her knickers in a knot over the wedding cake and one of the kitchen maids is crying in the coal cellar,” Gael remarked. 

“Why is the kitchen maid crying?” Caleb enquired, removing the outer sleeves that had protected his shirt arms as he polished the silver. 

Gael shrugged. “It’s probably because of Cook.”

Caleb nodded. It had been because of Cook on Tuesday too, when one of the footmen had locked himself in a cupboard. 

Cook wasn’t coping well with the changed situation. Years of working for Seymour and his almost complete lack of hospitality had left her distinctly rusty when it came to catering for a large event, like a wedding, and she was struggling to remember how to do it. How to contrive to produce food for a hundred guests at once, hot, and of a standard for the aristocracy. She had developed a near constant twitch over her left eye and muttered to herself about syllabubs most of the time.

Caleb felt rather sorry for Cook. 

He felt even more sorry for the staff that she was taking it out on.

“I’m coming,” he told Gael. “You go to talk to the kitchen maid, try to persuade her to come out, tell her whatever Cook might have said she isn’t in trouble. And I’ll deal with Cook.”

“Right-o,” Gael nodded. 

Then just as Caleb was half out of the door of his pantry Gael added, “Mr Hodgson, can I talk to _you_ later, about somethin’?”

There was a serious edge in Gael’s voice that made Caleb turn. He found Gael looking at him, suddenly seeming nervous.

“Is something wrong?” Caleb asked. 

“I don’t think so, just I need to talk to you,” Gael told him. “It’s complicated, so I’ve been thinkin’ about it and thinkin’ about it but now I reckon I’ve got it straight in my head.”

Caleb blinked. “You have? Oh. Well, yes, of course. We will talk later, if we can find the time.”

“It’s my belief that we better find the time, somehow, Mr Hodgson. Happen this is important,” Gael said, insistently, face colouring a bit.

Caleb got a strange queasy feeling then. “Is it something about his Lordship? Something else I don’t know?”

“Not about his Lordship, no,” Gael shook his head, brown curls vibrating. 

Caleb opened his mouth to suggest that they talk about this _now_ , despite the situation in the kitchen, but a wail from what sounded like the coal cellar made it clear that Gael’s mystery would have to wait. 

 

In the end Gael’s mystery was quite forgotten, for Caleb at least, because after he had placated Cook (something to do with lemon essence, as far as he could make out between sobs) it was time to dress Seymour for a formal dinner that night. 

It was to be held by Maria’s parents. They seemed to be hosting a lot of formal events in the run-up to the wedding, as if trying to distract Society from the whispers over the speed of the engagement. A few eyebrows remained raised at the shortness of the period between announcement and service. 

Seymour was more taciturn even than usual and Caleb dressed him in near total silence. 

Until Caleb was attaching cufflinks and suddenly couldn’t help himself and stroked his fingers over the back of Seymour’s hand. Seymour’s eyes met his, and then his fingers turned so that they were holding hands. 

There was nothing romantic about the way Seymour held hands, he held on fiercely, eyes challenging, staring at Caleb in a way that made Caleb blush. 

“Don’t think I don’t know what is happening,” Seymour growled. 

“Happening?” Caleb echoed, stupidly.

“Why you haven’t come knocking on my door at night.”

Caleb chose not to point out that Seymour hadn’t come to _him_ either. 

“I suppose I’m worried that you haven’t truly forgiven me, for running away.” Caleb was glad that when he said that Seymour didn’t pull his hand away, only held on tighter. 

Seymour snorted. “Don’t talk rot. That’s not the reason.”

Caleb found himself moving closer to Seymour, wanting to kiss him, but was stopped dead in his tracks by what Seymour said next.

“The reason is that you don’t trust me.”

 

Was it true? 

Later that night, Seymour having shrugged and gone to dinner, Caleb sat in his room, chewing his lip and staring at the slightly bulging plaster in the corner by the door. His eyes ran over it so often that he was beginning to feel unwell, almost dizzy, but he couldn’t seem to stop. 

He hadn’t really thought about his fears for the future as being because he didn’t trust his lover, and it made him queasy. Surely there was no love at all without trust? And he knew that he loved Seymour intensely. He hated to think that he was so mean spirited, so suspicious, that he couldn’t have faith in their future, not because of Maria but because he didn’t have faith in _Seymour_. 

‘Is that really what I’ve been worrying about all these weeks?’ he wondered. ‘Not that something might happen to draw Seymour away from me, over time, but that deep down I have no confidence in Seymour’s affection for me?’

An affection which, after all, Seymour had shown unequivocally. Not just the first morning Caleb returned, when Seymour failed to indulge his natural anger, when Seymour kissed him, when Seymour licked his blood away, but in all the other ways too since this affair had begun. 

Seymour taking the huge risk of lying with his servant at all.

Seymour paying him the respect of treating him as an equal almost from the start.

Seymour, who had once had to fight off a rapist, spreading his legs for Caleb, letting Caleb take him.

Seymour, a proud, aristocratic, cynical, man who nevertheless had got on his _knees_ one night, and pleasured Caleb with his mouth, an act that Caleb knew the upper classes expected to enjoy but considered themselves above actually giving. 

He had known a former rent boy once, at the orphanage. A curious Caleb had asked questions and been told everything. The information had proved useful the first night he had lain with Seymour, had meant that he knew (at least theoretically) what to do, but now he remembered something else the boy had said too. 

“Thing you got to remember is they want to fuck with men, but they ‘ave to feel they’re still the top, right? Still the important bugger in the hat, with the silver cane, and respectable life and all that. So, there’s stuff what _never_ happens!”

“Like what?” Caleb had whispered, in the darkness of the dormitory. 

“They’ll fuck me, and sometimes they want to be fucked themselves, right? But they don’t never want to suck another man’s cock. Never. Which is a right shame ‘cos I wanna know what that’s like!”

Seymour had done for Caleb something which would be a degradation for most other men, and despite Seymour’s claim at the time that he acted from curiosity, Caleb knew better. Curiosity may have played a part but it had happened the same night Caleb had been distressed by George Smythe’s comments on working class men who tried to educate themselves. Whether Seymour knew it or not he had been trying to show their equality when he got on his knees. 

Caleb closed his eyes, heart pounding. He was suddenly ashamed of himself, frustrated by his inability to trust Seymour when Seymour had done so much, in his uniquely grumpy way, to inspire it. 

He had used to think that when Kassandra took her own life she had taken his too. 

But now he understood that what she had actually taken was his faith in people, his trust, his belief that you could rely on a lover. She had said she loved him and that she was happy and then she had thrown herself in a river and destroyed the only thing he had ever lived for. And that would have been the end of it, except that he had fallen in love again, when he least expected to, and now it seemed that the poison of his old grief was eating away at that new love. Making him assume the worst at every turn, making him always anxious, waiting for Seymour to leave him in one way or another. 

Caleb bit his lip against a sob then and bent his head into his hands, because just for a moment, as he realised it all, he had hated her.

 

Tomorrow. Tomorrow Seymour would get married, and once he had everything would change. Maria would be in the house with them, living with them, and who was to say that once she’d recovered from the unfortunate start of her marriage she might not fall in love with Seymour? She might start to follow him around everywhere, bursting into his bedroom at night. 

She might work out what no one but Gideon Lawrence had, which was that Seymour was having illegal intercourse with his butler. 

She might go to the police!

Caleb shook his head, angry at his obsessive thinking, at his dark view of both Maria’s character (after all he had no reason to believe that she was the sort of woman who would want to destroy another person in that way) and the future. If only he could accept, as he’d promised to, that this was reality, that the marriage was unavoidable, and make the best of it. Have hope that things wouldn’t change for the worse. 

He set his jaw against the relentless barrage of worries and imaginings and returned his attention to the task in hand, namely, packing Seymour’s trunk for the honeymoon. 

The honeymoon had been something else they couldn’t avoid, even though Seymour had said that Maria didn’t want one any more than he did. People were already talking about the brevity of the   
engagement, and the fact that neither party seemed especially happy to be getting married, so all the conventions must be observed in hopes that gossip would die down. 

It was agonising because Caleb would be going with them. It would have been strange for a man of Seymour’s class to go abroad without a manservant, just as it would be unthinkable for Maria to travel without her maid, Elsie. So Caleb was going on a honeymoon with the man he loved, that man’s new wife (pregnant by someone else), and a maid who was going to need to be fooled as to the true nature of the marriage in case she started talking when they got home. 

It was all rather nightmarish. 

Just as Caleb was strapping closed the trunk he heard the door of the dressing room open behind him. 

“Mr Hodgson?”

“Come in Gael, I’m nearly finished here.”

Gael came in and perched on the edge of another trunk, watching as Caleb carefully inserted the destination cards in the leather tags. They were going to Paris, mostly, he suspected, because Seymour thought the legendary clothes shopping there would keep Maria distracted and therefore away from him.

“Can you talk now, Mr Hodgson?” Gael asked.

Caleb blinked. Oh, yes, there had been some mystery, hadn’t there? He had quite forgotten it after Seymour’s painfully accurate accusation.

He sat back on the carpet, too weary in too many ways to stand up for the moment, and nodded. “Of course, Gael. What is on your mind?”

Gael was looking anxious, almost frightened. “You promise you won’t be angry?”

“Why would I be angry?”

“I reckon I should ‘ave told you this years and years ago, but I didn’t understand it and I didn’t really remember it and it’s all dark and confusin’ and,”

“Gael, breathe,” Concerned, Caleb leaned forward and touched Gael’s vibrating knee. “I won’t be angry, but what on earth is it?”

Gael took a deep breath and stopped jiggling his knee up and down. “You know what you said about your sister, that morning you run off?”

Caleb felt the colour rise up his face. He had hoped Gael would never bring that up. He had hoped that the boy hadn’t understood that Caleb had been referring to an incestuous lover. 

He could only nod.

Gael was blushing too by then. “Thing is, I was right angry with you when you run off, leaving his lordship an’ that, and then I thought about everything you said, about how lovers always lie to you and how Kassandra lied to you ‘cos she said she loved you but threw herself in the river.”

“Yes,” Caleb closed his eyes. More than anything, he didn’t want to be having this conversation.

“She didn’t throw herself in the river!”

Caleb’s eyes snapped open. “ _What_?”

Gael shook his head vehemently. “You remember when I got…when I was…” The boy swallowed and then visibly forced the words out, “You remember after I got stuck in the wall and Seymour saved me and let me live with him? I was right confused and scared but she was kind and she never told me off or nothing even though I couldn’t speak.”

Caleb remembered it well. Gael hadn’t spoken for months after Seymour had pulled him from the dark, screaming if he was in any room smaller than he liked, but he had used to sit near Kassandra, watching her sewing, as if he found her presence comforting. 

“I saw her,” Gael told him. “I was out in the woods near the house, looking at the trees and the river. I had a nightmare again and I was crying and I climbed a big tree. And I saw her out walking. I was high up in the tree, pretending that I was a monkey and I had never seen no chimneys, didn’t know what a chimney was, and I could see for miles and miles and I knew it was her, she weren’t so far away, and I could see her face. She looked happy. She was smiling.”

Caleb’s hand tightened on Gael’s knee and the boy winced but didn’t stop. 

“I thought she looked like a picture, walking by the river, with the trees all golden and that. I reckon I thought it _was_ a picture, or maybe I hadn’t really woken up. It was always like that back then, I told meself stories so I wouldn’t be always so scared. But now I know it was real! And,” Gael started crying, in big fat drops that rolled down his face and fell from his chin. “I’m sorry Mr Hodgson, I’m really sorry, I saw her slip over and fall in the river, but I thought it was a dream or a picture and I didn’t understand and I should have done something but I was too far away anyway and the river was fast and,”

With a pained cry Caleb reached out and tugged Gael off the trunk and into his arms, holding him tight, his own tears falling on the boy’s untidy hair. “Gael,” he gasped, “Gael it’s alright, you were seven, you were too far away, you couldn’t have saved her, don’t cry…it was an accident.”

Caleb took a deep, terrible, breath and stared sightlessly into the past. 

“It was an accident.”

 

When he was sure that Gael was alright, that the poor boy understood that he couldn’t blame himself, Caleb went to his bedroom and sat for a long time, unmoving. 

_She didn’t kill herself._

_She loved me. She didn’t lie to me. She didn’t die because of what we had done, because of me._

_It was an accident._

By the time he looked up, it was ten o’clock.

It was time to go to Seymour.

 

Seymour looked tired. His gaze fell on the honeymoon trunks, on his suit laid out for the morning, and he sighed irritably. 

“Curse the wedding, curse the honeymoon, curse it all…” he muttered, as Caleb took off his shirt. 

Seymour had spent the evening by himself in his study, perhaps ‘enjoying’ his last as a bachelor. He seemed a little drunk.

Caleb carefully put the shirt to one side. “You are having doubts?”

Seymour gave him a very straight look. “It’s far too late to try to talk me out of it.”

“No, I understand that. It is going to happen. You are going to get married tomorrow.” Caleb handed Seymour his night shirt. 

“And you’re never going to forgive me for it, damn you,” Seymour said, almost snatching the shirt out of his hands. “Whatever you said. You don’t trust me.”

“I love you,” Caleb said, quietly.

Seymour’s mouth opened, and his face drained of colour. 

Then he sat down suddenly on the bed, dropping the nightshirt heedlessly to the floor. 

Caleb knelt down in front of him, placed his hand on Seymour’s cheek and said, “I love you, and I hope you love me, but you don’t need to say it. I just wanted you to hear it. I want you to understand that I’ve made mistakes, been suspicious and untrusting, but I think things will be different now. You can rely on me.”

Seymour swallowed, and then demanded, gruffly, “You won’t run off again?”

“I swear I will not. I will be with you, for as long as you want me.”

Seymour reached out a hesitant hand, tangled it in Caleb’s hair. “Tomorrow I will get married, and I will kiss her and say the words, it will be ‘till death do us part’ and all that rubbish. And she’ll be here in this house. We’ll have to hide more than ever, be more careful even than before. Can you endure that?”

“Yes. I love you. I will always be with you.”

Seymour stared at him, face inscrutable.

“If…If that’s what you want?” Caleb added. He couldn’t help it. He needed to be sure that Seymour’s feelings went as deep as his.

Seymour tugged him forward, rough fingers in Caleb’s hair, and hissed, “Don’t ask stupid questions. You think I don’t care whether I have you around? While you were gone I had a lot of time to think and I made a decision.”

Caleb pushed Seymour back on the bed, and began to run hungry fingers over Seymour’s naked chest. Feeling his heart beating. 

“What decision was that?” Caleb asked, bending his head to kiss and bite at a nipple.

Seymour’s hips jerked against him. Caleb smiled and began to slide a hand downwards, only to be stopped by a strong grip around his wrist. 

He raised his eyes to Seymour’s face, met an unflinching, serious gaze.

“I decided,” Seymour said, “That if you came back and said that you couldn’t do it, couldn’t see me married to her, I decided that I would…let it all go.”

Caleb sucked in a breath, shock swamping his body. “Let it…let it all…” he stammered. 

Seymour’s eyes were defensive but his voice was that of a man speaking only truth, albeit reluctant truth. “Damn the estate, damn the family name, I would sell up.”

Caleb buried his face against Seymour’s shoulder, thinking ferociously. Was it too late? Could he ask Seymour to do it? To call off the wedding, declare bankruptcy? They could run away, they could...

No… He couldn’t ask Seymour to do that. To throw away so much of who he was and to betray his father’s legacy, not to mention destroying Maria in the process. 

It was enough, Caleb realised, as Seymour’s arms went around him, to know that Seymour had been prepared to do it. 

Because Caleb knew what it meant that Seymour had even considered such a step, however briefly, let alone resolved to do it if Caleb ever issued such an ultimatum. 

_He loves me. He loves me more than his name, his pride, his family duty, his father._

Caleb raised his head and kissed Seymour deeply, hungrily. “No more talking,” he said, running his hands down Seymour’s body, tugging off the last of his clothes. “It’s our wedding night.”

 

The first time was hard and fast and desperate, it having been so many weeks since they last lay together. Caleb growled in the back of his throat as he sank into Seymour’s body, overwhelmed by tight heat, the smell of Seymour’s sweat, and the way Seymour groaned and pushed to meet him, despite evident pain in those staggeringly beautiful eyes. 

“I’m sorry, it’s hurting,” Caleb whispered. 

“Shut up,” Seymour ordered, fingers digging into Caleb’s back, his hard cock rubbing eagerly against Caleb’s stomach. 

Caleb moaned and began to take Seymour deeply, quickly, their breaths panting in the quiet room, already verging on climax and so intensely relieved when it took only a few strokes of his fingers for Seymour to hiss, arch upwards, and spill between them. 

Caleb wrapped his seed-slick hand around Seymour’s hip, thrust once, twice, and then sobbed pleasure.

Afterwards Seymour laughed breathlessly and said, “I’ve never run a race like _that_ before.”

Caleb laughed too, rather ashamedly. “It’s been too many weeks since we were together. We were too eager. Next time will be much longer,” he promised.

“It might be a few days before we have another opportunity,” Seymour pointed out. 

Caleb grinned and took Seymour’s hand, guiding it down to Caleb’s already stiffening cock. “I was thinking in about five minutes,” he said.

Seymour grinned one of his rare, total, smiles. “You are the dictionary definition of smug,” he remarked. He ran a finger over Caleb’s mouth. “Perhaps you should persuade me to join you.” He motioned significantly downwards to his own satiated body. 

Caleb thought there was something very erotic in feeling Seymour harden in his mouth, feeling his cock go from soft to stiff, against his tongue, between his lips, and hearing Seymour’s breath quicken as he did it. 

And there was something even more erotic in the sensation of his own seed, slippery against his fingers, as he stroked his fingers inside Seymour’s body. 

Soon Seymour was groaning, and his hips were shaking, his hole tightening around Caleb’s fingers.

Caleb wasn’t proud of it but when he spread Seymour’s legs, entering him for the second time, he was thinking that tomorrow when Seymour stood at the altar he would be feeling sore and had. There would be a constant, physical, reminder all through the service about who Seymour was _really_ married to. 

Caleb bit his lip against the triumphant snarl that had nearly escaped him, and began to move gently, shivering with pleasure at the knowledge that he was taking Seymour with the wet assistance of his own seed, his own earlier climax making Seymour ready for his penetration now. 

Seymour pulled him down for a long kiss.

Kiss, thrust, _moan_ , skin damp with sweat, and lips bitten into to keep in cries, as they made love in tangled sheets that Caleb was going to have to hide in the morning. Making love in the dark with Seymour open and beneath him, and Caleb kissing him and biting him wherever it wouldn’t show. 

All the while thinking, ‘he was going to give up everything for me, if I asked it.’

All the while thinking, ‘I love him, I love him, I love him.’

Seymour reached down and touched himself, bringing himself to a second climax and letting Caleb watch him do it, watch him lose control, watch him…. 

Caleb pushed one more time, and let pleasure pull him apart and then put him back together as someone else.

Just as dawn was breaking through the curtains.


	19. Epilogue

“Stop squirming,” Caleb told the baby, smiling. 

The baby glared at him, already displaying a personality alarmingly similar to that of his supposed father. Caleb didn’t know how that was possible, since there was no blood connection at all between Seymour and the child everyone thought to be his son, but nevertheless baby Arthur still somehow contrived to be very _Seymour_.

It occurred to Caleb as he dandled the infant on his knee that Arthur’s nurse would be horrified that Caleb had brought the child to a graveyard but Caleb reasoned that Arthur couldn’t understand where he was so it was alright. 

Besides…

“I know you never met,” Caleb said to the grave, quietly, holding up a baby now doing its level best to stare Caleb’s chest into producing a nipple. Arthur hadn’t quite accepted Caleb’s lack of breasts yet and kept trying to latch on, seemingly under the impression that Caleb could be bullied into lactation. “But he’s such a lovely boy (most of the time) and I know you would have adored him. You would have been such a wonderful mother, if you’d had the chance, if things had been different. You were always so kind to Gael.”

The grave echoed back silence. 

Caleb sighed. 

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Caleb continued, on the off chance that she was listening. “Seymour _loves_ this little thing, and he’s absolutely furious about that! You should have seen how he was when Arthur had a fever. And it was only the tiniest fever.”

Seymour had been grim and deadly throughout that anxious two days, eyes like something from the Old Testament, chewing on his cigarettes until they split, abusing the doctor with truly shocking language when the baby didn’t _instantly_ recover after just one consultation. Caleb had felt terribly sorry for the doctor. 

And later he’d added him to the list of professionals that had refused to ever return to Seymour’s house. 

It was quite a long list.

“I think when Seymour married, he only did it partly for the money. I think he was also interested in having a son to pass the estate onto, even if it was someone else’s son. Seymour was himself adopted, remember? So it was easy enough for him to take on another man’s child. I just don’t think he knew that he would become a father in more than name.” Caleb smiled down at Arthur, who was blowing bubbles. “You’re ever so loved, little one. You don’t need to know how it started.” Caleb glanced around the graveyard to check once more that he wasn’t being overheard, but the autumn day was empty of other mourners. “We aren’t going to tell him,” Caleb said to the grave. “He’s going to grow up thinking that Seymour is his father. I think it’s a kind lie, and besides, it’s true in its way. It takes more than blood to make a father.”

Caleb shivered a little and decided that he couldn’t in all conscience keep Arthur out here any longer. So he stood, adjusted an increasingly grumpy baby (who would, based on past experience, very likely vomit in revenge, shortly), and smiled sadly down at the grave. 

“Sleep well, Maria,” Caleb said. 

 

It had been a nightmare full of terrible echoes. A lost woman, making Caleb think of Kassandra, and so much blood, making them all think of Lord Christopher. One day Maria had been nine months gone (although as far as anyone other than Caleb, Seymour and she herself was concerned, it was only seven and a half months) and she was a mite grumpy, gravid and achy, lying on the sofa on a spring morning.

And the next day it had been screaming and blood and frightened doctors and Elsie the ladies maid crying in the hallway.

And when the baby came, a tiny wizened thing like a red prune, Maria had closed her eyes.

And never opened them again. 

Caleb had a faint memory of his angry thoughts that morning, of standing in Maria’s chaotic bedroom as dawn broke, holding the baby, dull with shock, thinking, “Why must we lose our women so often in this way? Why does this happen?” Thinking of his own mother, of Gael’s, taken by childbed fevers, or by the strain of too many pregnancies, or by just one gone dreadfully wrong. Too many babies in too many orphanages because their mothers didn’t survive bringing them into the world. Too many doctors who never seemed to know what to do when healthy strong women wouldn’t stop bleeding or became delirious two days after the birth or all the other ways that the human body confounded science.

‘What good is science?’ Caleb had wondered. “What good is all this progress, the railways, the telegraph, the great iron ships, the microscopes which show us the tiniest details of nature, if we can’t stop our women dying like this?”

But then he’d been dragged from his boiling resentment by Seymour, face drawn, eyes shadowed, standing up from where he’d been sat by the bed, and walking towards him. 

Caleb had shifted the newborn to his hip and slipped tired fingers into Seymour’s golden hair, touched their foreheads together.

The room was silent, all the drama now over, the doctors and surgeons gone, the maids crying downstairs, the house in grim mourning. 

“I didn’t love her,” Seymour said. “And she knew it.”

Caleb bit his lip. Guilt. He understood guilt. “She was happy enough, with us, the short time she was here. And grateful that you thought none the less of her for her condition.”

“Her condition killed her,” Seymour said. He leaned back a little and looked at the baby. “Do you suppose the father would even trouble to mourn her, if he knew she had died giving birth to his son? After he seduced and abandoned her?”

Caleb decided then and there that he must put a stop to any thoughts of obsessive vengeance in Seymour’s mind, for all their sake. 

“This child only has one father that matters,” Caleb said, firmly. “I think Maria would agree.”

Seymour was still looking at the baby. “Such a strange, ugly, little thing,” he observed. 

“All babies are,” Caleb shrugged. 

Seymour went very silent, staring at the baby, something very akin to fear on his face. It took Caleb some moments to recognise the emotion, he’d never seen it on Seymour’s face before. 

“Seymour,” he said. “We will raise him together. We’ll manage.”

Seymour looked at him. “Yes.”

“Yes,” Caleb said, nodding. 

And Seymour kissed him. 

 

Now, six months later, the house had settled into a system that allowed a widower with no maternal instincts to be raising a child more or less successfully. Arthur was in Seymour’s old nursery (Caleb looked forward to the day Arthur was old enough to play with Seymour’s toy soldiers), with a day nurse, a night nurse, and a nanny in general supervision. 

Caleb resented the nanny because she seemed to think a bachelor butler had no business poking his nose into everything to do with Arthur’s wellbeing on a daily basis, whereas Caleb secretly knew that he was every bit as much Arthur’s parent as Seymour was. It frustrated Caleb to have to pretend that he was only compassionately concerned for his employer’s motherless child, when in reality he was never happy if he’d gone a whole day without spending some time with the lad. 

Fortunately Nanny seemed to have decided that Caleb was slightly, though harmlessly, insane and so pandered to him. 

Every evening after dinner she brought the baby down to spend time with Seymour, and Caleb always contrived to have business in the study at that time, so that he could determine to his own satisfaction whether Arthur was cheerful and well fed, or fractious and croupy. Whether a new facial expression had been ingeniously mastered since the previous evening. 

He still hadn’t quite forgiven Seymour for his reaction when Caleb had announced, “Oh! His first smile!”

Seymour had harrumphed and said, “More likely it’s wind.”

(Although Caleb had stopped sulking when Seymour slipped into his room later that night and made Caleb see Heaven, with mouth, and hands, and tight, warm, body.)

Caleb shivered at the thought of it and went back to counting the silver forks. 

Unfortunately he lost count when Gael burst in, looking taller than yesterday somehow, and declared, “Nanny says th’ baby is teething but I reckon its just evil!”

Caleb hid a smile. There was, he believed, a little bit of jealousy in Gael’s heart over Seymour’s new son. “Babies are often troublesome when they’re teething,” he explained. Caleb knew this because he’d read approximately twenty books about babies and baby-rearing in the past six months. Odd to relate however the books weren’t much help when it came to real life. No matter how educated Caleb was on the theory, Arthur still often left them all in hold-on-and-hope-to-God-for-the-best situations.

“It always wants something!” Gael remarked. 

“So says the boy whose third question on entering my room is always, ‘have you got any biscuits,’” Caleb pointed out. 

Gael glared in a way that reminded Caleb of both Seymour _and_ Arthur. 

Sometimes Caleb wondered how he had contrived to end up with a husband and two demanding children. 

It was a funny thing, this _life_ business. 

 

The teething period was a trial, no denying it. Even Nanny was twitching and muttering by the time the last canine came through, although, interestingly, practically the only thing that had got Arthur to sleep until then was Gael’s monkey impression. Arthur seemed to think it the most hilarious thing that had ever been instituted by man or God in the whole history of humanity. 

And Caleb noticed that Gael stopped saying that Arthur was evil after being rewarded with the first delighted chuckle. 

 

One evening soon after the end of the dreadful teething process Caleb was sat in the nursery by the fire, listening to the winter wind howling outside, and holding the baby. 

They were blinking at each other. 

It was most entertaining. 

“Nanny will have your hide for encroaching on her kingdom,” a sardonic voice pointed out from the doorway. 

Caleb looked up and smiled. “Nanny has had an attack of her arthritis and has gone to bed. The night nurse hadn’t had her supper so I said I’d watch him.”

Seymour closed the door and came to the fire to take the opposite armchair. “You make it sound as though you were being selfless. You don’t fool me.”

Caleb laughed, caught out. “I admit there is a possibility that Emily will have to prise the child from my arms when she comes back.”

Seymour sighed. “I don’t know why I even employ nurses and a nanny. You might as well do it all.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Seymour stared into the fire for awhile, Caleb went back to his blinking competition with Arthur, and all three of them enjoyed the companionable silence. There wasn’t much silence in the house these days, what with Arthur, and Gael, and extra baby-related staff. Caleb suspected that Seymour suffered rather from all the people and noise and chaos, but he manfully endured.

And there were, of course, other things to be endured. 

Like a woman who should be there. And wasn’t. 

Like Kassandra. 

So much loss. 

And still, always, the fear. Caleb had had to push his copy of The Picture of Dorian Grey to the back of his bookshelf, unable to bear looking at it now that the newspapers were full of what was happening to poor Mr Wilde. It made Caleb tremble with anxiety as the man was raked across the coals of Society for the very sin committed by Caleb and Seymour on a near nightly basis. 

It could so easily have been them.

It still could be. 

It would only take one unexpectedly opened door, one thoughtless brush of the hand in the wrong situation, one look which spoke of hunger, for them to be found out, for them to be disgraced. 

And, Caleb thought, as Arthur tired of the blinking game and began to drift off to sleep, they had even more to lose now. 

 

Caleb wound the grandfather clock in the hallway checked the doors were locked. The wind was still raging outside, winter well and truly upon them. He would have to start thinking about ordering salt for the paths soon. 

And then there was the wedding. 

Gideon Lawrence had finally worn down his Methodistical young lady and so in a few weeks Caleb and Seymour were travelling into Exeter to the Hall for possibly the most surprising marriage since Seymour’s own. Society was agog to know who this young woman was to have finally hooked the most notorious rake of his generation, and what kind of saint she must be to take on a man rumoured to be paying for the education of at least two of his illegitimate children.

As far as Caleb was concerned Patience was another kind of saint too, the kind who knew that he and Seymour were lying together and, though she didn’t understand it, had never breathed a word. Caleb was _grateful_ for that, and planned to tell Gideon what a lucky man he was at the first opportunity.

Although he suspected that Gideon already knew how fortunate he was. 

Gideon had dropped by to invite them to the wedding a few weeks previously. Seymour had sighed irritably at the realisation that he was being asked to an unavoidable social event, Caleb had thanked Gideon sincerely for including him, and Arthur had celebrated by being sick on Gideon’s waistcoat. 

“I suppose I had better get used to this,” Gideon had said, with an air of a hunted animal in his eyes, despite his evident happiness.

Caleb blotted Gideon’s clothes while Seymour grinned and congratulated his son on his aim. 

“Certainly, since you’re marrying you can expect babies of your own soon,” Caleb said.

Gideon produced a rueful smile. “She knows about the other ones,” he said quietly, just out of Seymour’s earshot.

Caleb hesitated, still bent over the stain, cloth in hand. “You told her?”

“I told her everything,” Gideon turned dazzling, awe-struck, eyes on Caleb’s face. “And she loves me anyway.”

 

Confident that the doors were locked and the ground floor fires all banked for the night, Caleb climbed the staircase to Seymour’s rooms. There was a blessed lack of wailing on the landing.

Caleb truly wasn’t going to regret the ending of teething. It was marvellous to have comparative peace restored, even if only for the few hours before Arthur’s awakening. 

He found Seymour smoking in the window seat, watching the gale, bedroom lights off. Caleb went to sit next to him, invisible to the outside from the darkened room, legs tangling with Seymour’s. 

Seymour wrapped a gentle hand around Caleb’s ankle, under his trousers, making Caleb catch his breath. Even so simple a touch could send a hot pulse right down his spine. 

“Why do you always sit and watch storms?” Caleb asked, when he’d recovered his senses a little.

Seymour shrugged. “When I was a boy I did it to prove that I wasn’t afraid.”

‘I bet you _were_ afraid,’ Caleb thought, with a secret smile. ‘And that only made you more determined to sit in the dark and let the storm rage at you through the glass.’

“Did you see the papers today?” Seymour asked, eventually. 

“No, I was too busy.”

“Wilde has been sentenced to two years with hard labour.”

Caleb didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem anything to say. 

There would always be a storm raging. Just on the other side of a pane of glass. 

After awhile he rose, draw the curtains, and took Seymour’s hand, took him to bed.

 

They undressed each other, kissing and whispering, and Seymour lay down and pulled Caleb down with him, so that they slotted together, perfectly, mouth to mouth, hip to hip, belly against belly. So that Caleb could touch and love and give pleasure. So that Seymour could shudder and moan. And then give the pleasure back, with long fingered hands, soft, slick, skin, and heat.

And that blissfully agonising build of _almost **almost** almost_, as Caleb thrust and Seymour thrust in turn, trying to crawl inside each other, to know each other inside out, until Caleb couldn’t hold off any more, couldn’t fight the sensation racking his flesh.

He stroked Seymour, hand on cock, mouth on mouth, deep inside him, so that when Seymour climaxed with a raw groan Caleb felt every shiver and shake and hallelujah of it, wrapped tight around him.

Caleb buried his face in Seymour’s neck and ground against him, breathless, chasing the climax that he almost didn’t want because then it would be over but _oh_ he couldn’t deny himself another second and... _there_ …

 

A long time later he became aware of Seymour’s arms around him, came back to himself. 

“Don’t let me fall asleep,” he murmured, drowsily, his eyes heavy but knowing that he couldn’t stay in Seymour’s bed all night. 

One day he hoped they would find a way to really sleep together, and wake up together, without fear of discovery. He wanted to know what that would feel like. 

“Get off,” Seymour said, sleepily. “You’ve given me cramp in my leg.”

Caleb grinned tiredly and gently pulled out of Seymour’s body, not commenting on the gasp of pleasure it elicited, mindful of Seymour’s pride. 

 

When he could no longer put it off Caleb dragged himself out of bed and out of Seymour’s warm arms and started to look for his clothes. 

“Oh, one thing before you scuttle back to your garret,” Seymour drawled, lighting a cigarette from his position sitting up naked in bed, utterly unselfconscious and unconscionably beautiful. 

“What’s that?” Caleb asked, vaguely, his body was stirring at the sight of Seymour like that. 

“You’ll be getting a letter sometime soon accepting you onto a new correspondence degree course being run by my old tutor at Cambridge,” Seymour informed him, tone casual but belied by a flicker of light in his eyes not caused by his cigarette.

Caleb swallowed. “Wh…what? I didn’t apply for a course. I didn’t know it was possible to study for a degree by correspondence.”

Seymour shrugged. “It’s a new approach, not everyone has three years to spend hanging about a university. I heard about it at the Old Boy’s Reunion last month and put your name down for the first intake. I said I’d sponsor you, guarantee that you’re up to it academically, so you’ll have to do it now or make me look daft.”

“I…I…” Caleb was almost in tears. Seymour knew, he must know, what this meant to Caleb, that he would have a degree, a real education, that he was going to be able to study as he’d always dreamt. As he’d ached to do when he’d been just a bastard orphan with no future in the slums of east London. 

Seymour put his cigarette in an ashtray and knelt up on the bed, pulling Caleb against him and looking at him, eyes a strange mixture of glee and exasperation. 

“Don’t thank me,” Seymour ordered him. 

And he kissed Caleb long and slow and sweet.

“ _Don’t thank me_.”


End file.
